


Always Be Knolling

by YourGayDads



Category: Black Sails, Whitechapel (TV)
Genre: Crossover, M/M, Original Character Death(s), Reincarnation, for the 3 people in both fandoms and me, i know squat about uk police/legal procedures, no kendler sorry, pretending i do plot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-12 02:03:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 28,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29752416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YourGayDads/pseuds/YourGayDads
Summary: Chandler meets a guy who thinks he's someone from his past.
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton, Joseph Chandler/James Flint
Comments: 16
Kudos: 28





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> \- if you’ve only seen whitechapel, you will not get any of this. sorry. alsowatchblacksails
> 
> \- i am clearly not british and pulled everything about whitechapel (the nabe) out of my butt.
> 
> \- a big thank you to FlyingCatPerson for the needed britpicking <3 <3
> 
> \- jokey title was cribbed from tom sachs.
> 
> \- the following chapters will not be as long as this one.

Chandler set the timer on his phone and attentively watched it tick down. When it reached zero, the water, as it should have, had come to a delicate boil at 75 degrees. This temperature, he determined after much trial and error, was the optimal one for his taste and promptly switched the kettle off. He poured it out over a conical hill of powder at the bottom of a small white bowl and observed grassy green wisps spool outwards as it dissolved.

Chandler reserved this absurdly expensive matcha for the weekends while he fortified himself with cheap sachets of green tea throughout the week. His semi-annual lectures on its brain-healthy attributes never made any converts to the stuff. Not even Kent. The number of milky, sugary teas his team could imbibe in a day pained him to think about, and, dear god, why did he have to think about their bad habits now too? It had been that kind of a day which was definitely not a pleasant weekend afternoon. To be exact, it was the ass-end of a particularly frustrating Tuesday that he required this remedy for.

After he whisked the tea into a pale froth, he inhaled its clean, vegetal scent and let it warm the tip of his nose. Drinking this was probably inadvisable at this hour, but take what peace you could, he thought. Break a self-imposed rule once in a while. With last night’s dream still lingering in his flat, and the events of the day replaying themselves in his head, sleep wasn’t going to be forthcoming anyway.

Work had ended as it usually did with him tossing the coffee filter, nearly overflowing with cold grounds, into the bin, a chore Kent tended to overlook. Not that that was for him to do, and Chandler would never speak of it as if it was. Like they had all accepted so much of him, he accepted that for what it was too. The inescapable untidiness of life. Circumstances continually demanded this kind of flexibility, because breaking, he learned the hard way, was not a viable alternative. He even told them all to submit their reports by five instead of four since they’d all been waylaid by the abrupt arrival of Commander Anderson. At the sight of him, Chandler had winced, because of what his rare presence at the station entailed but also how cartoonishly donnish he appeared. How Chandler thought he must have appeared to his team at first and not the neurotic disaster they had all immediately sussed him as.

Following Anderson was a small cadre of plain-clothes officers who set upon the incident room with their sleeves already rolled up. They bumped everyone from their desks without preamble to scour and scrub their computers and in trays. His team returned the courtesy by hovering close enough to discomfit and offered little but loud, lengthy, trilling slurps of excessively sweetened coffee while Chandler and Anderson faced off in his fishbowl of an office. The Commander, who knew all the rules and recommendations as well as he did, swatted down every bureaucratic maneuver in Chandler’s arsenal with economy. An appeal to common sense then! Obviously their removal from the search would set back any progress made. They had the trust albeit begrudgingly of community leaders. They were intimately familiar with the lay of the land. They —

“Orders from above,” Anderson cited, which meant the Minister himself.

In a softer tone, he conveyed that the particular MP involved didn’t have confidence in the investigating officer who let the Ripper get away. Chandler’s legacy. He could have snapped the pen in his hand in half if it weren’t for the mess that would have created. He set it down parallel to the right edge of his blotter then spread his hands out on his desk to brace himself for the more heated argument he was about to launch.

“Have sympathy for a distraught father, Joe.”

Chandler’s words died on his tongue. It was a strike he couldn’t parry, and Anderson knew it. What was ultimately a show of a fight was now over, and Anderson strode out of Chandler’s office and out of the incident room, not in the slightest bit ruffled. His team was looking expectantly at him. He ran his hand through his hair and responded with a solemn shake of the head. They could complain about this over pints later.

This should have been their chance to not redeem themselves but to show that lot they were in fact damn good at this. And there that chance went — thwarted again. _Cursed!_ they’d half-joke. They’d already done the legwork of recreating the girl’s day up to her disappearance and canvassing the area, its residents and business owners. _What a fucking waste_ , Mansell seethed. He and the others needed this but especially for their boss.

According to CCTV footage, her last confirmed sighting was right outside of their doors. Before that her father’s office in the City. She had stopped in front of their entrance, her head tilted in something like curiosity. Her body language suggested no urgency, that she wasn’t under duress, but maybe indecision. Then decision made, she continued on, hands in the pockets of her hooded sweatshirt.

His team and every available uniform were out while Chandler, to his displeasure, had to stay behind to coordinate with their liaisons at MI5 and the Home Office. Dealing directly with the girl’s father, Peter Ash, they sounded noticeably weary — and wary. Chandler didn’t envy them one bit. That morning Ash’s press conference was on every news program, clips running on loop afterwards. Years in the public eye and of media training hadn’t mitigated the insincerity he freely exuded even as he pleaded for his daughter’s safe return. Seated next to him was his lawyer, a generously coiffed man who had the expression of someone unsure if his yogurt had gone bad while sniffing it. Never had there been a more unsympathetic pair in recent memory. Chandler wouldn’t have given them a single pound to save the voles.

He was about as far as you could get from the families Chandler had had to deal with, but what did he know? Give the man the benefit of the doubt. However unlikeable he was. It’s not like Chandler was in the room when the fact that she might be missing set in. He didn’t know if the blood drained from his face or if he struck the nearest wall out of anger. Fear. Perhaps Ash did as difficult as that was to imagine. When Chandler had been in those rooms, seeing pain that plainly was never not a shock. Since he was child, he was conditioned to face all crises with a stiff upper lip — like a true Englishman, and that his troubles were his alone and to make them known was a failure of character. This was nonsense of course, but he still tried to adhere to this principle out of habit more or less, and often fell short. Where Chandler had succeeded, he quietly, fastidiously carved up his own grief into small, manageable pieces that he neatly packaged and put away. Perhaps this was what Ash was doing too.

Chandler had swept the crumbs from his breakfast of dry sprouted toast off the kitchen counter then ran his hand flat over the length of it in search of more. Like most mornings. He had cynically wondered as he chewed how much this bolstered Ash’s reelection chances. (What was the opposite of the benefit of the doubt? Chandler made a mental note to find out later.) Ash had won his seat rather miraculously if only by the skin of his teeth in what was a safe borough for Labour. Unfortunately for him, when it came to politics, his wealthy supporters hated a risky bet. So turn a crisis into an opportunity as many have said, even if that crisis was the disappearance of your only child.

That only child’s pale, sullen face glared from the screen of his television again. Miles had likened it to a bad-tempered thumb, which Chandler couldn’t quite see. It was inarguably a bad photo, a close crop of one from a school event. Two seconds spent perusing her social media accounts turned up myriad smiling, sun-baked selfies, but that was their picture of choice, what Ash had on hand. Did the man not have a communications director? Someone to tell him _no, not that photo, are you thick?_ (Wait, he did. Chandler now recalled his name.) If he was at all prone to armchair psychologizing, he might have pegged Ash for the distant parent who prioritized his ambitions above family and her as likely to come to resent everything he stood for. Hardly an uncommon story. It could have been Chandler’s if his father had been around longer.

 _Oh_.

His father.

Chandler set the television remote down.

How many years had passed? Since he died? Some quick math had Chandler realizing that he’d been alive for three times as long without him as he had with him. And when was the last time he thought about him? The last lull in his thoughts when his parents tended to creep in. As busy as he was, he supposed he wasn’t busy enough if he was thinking about them now. _Well, keep busier then, Joe_. Keep those thoughts at bay, those dark waters that could seep so easily through those perfect seams and submerge you in them. Of late, at the very least, any threat of them had been limited to his dreams, but they had become more frequent. Stranger and more disconcerting too. Different, unfamiliar. Maybe there was a slight tremble to his hand when he reached for the breadbox. Stress and insufficient rest could do that to you. _Obviously_. A light sleeper, Chandler rarely failed to wake up before the alarm however late he’d gone to bed. So he made a mental note to go to bed earlier.

It was one of those dreams that had thrown him into consciousness that morning. He was gasping like he’d been holding his breath. His skin tingled with dread. He pressed the pad of his thumb against the corner of the bedside table and counted the seconds until the swirling silt in his head settled. When he opened his eyes, it was nearly the intended time to get up. He would let the alarm sound needlessly so his morning routine could begin officially. Normally.

If only he could stop trying to puzzle out what sensibly couldn’t be. Time and energy should be spent on important matters — other people’s lives, other people’s deaths — instead of on his dreams. _What did they mean though?_ he couldn’t resist asking himself anyway. Like he was in his student flat again, alone with some confounding work of literature or art. But nothing recent, including this case, struck close enough to home to cause the kind of psychic friction that would have trauma bubbling up like a blister.

Anyone might have surmised these dreams were about his father, except Chandler wasn’t crumpled beside his body with water lapping gently all around them. Instead Chandler was in it, the water, inches below the surface with distorted, fractured faces looking down at him. Their hands, more hands than there were bodies to which they could have belonged, held him down. The water was as cold as he remembered the sea that day. It slowly widened out until nothing was within his grasp, and nothing beneath his feet. No more hands or faces, just a figure in the distance obscured by a thick screen of racing bubbles. It wasn’t his father though. While he never could see this man clearly, he knew that with certainty. He also knew if he could reach this mysterious person, he — they — would somehow survive this. He just had to —

Chandler closed his eyes as if he could fall back into it. Overwhelmed yet hollowed out in the way troubling dreams could leave you, he lay there with his heart gripped by desperation. Desperation to — do what exactly? Get back something — someone he’d lost (but not his father), who, with each dream, seemed to get closer and more real — whatever the hell “real” meant. That man… What — who — magnified his life with an intensity of feeling that he might have compared to having a gun pointed at him. But not that. No, definitely not that. Admittedly he was a bit short on experiences he could compare this feeling to. The eureka moment perhaps? That high from discovering the key to making sense of a case. _Christ, what was the right word?_ Was it…

Happiness?

Chandler scoffed out loud and turned the alarm off.

As part of the job, they all had to consider the infinite possible ways the mind could conjure to inflict hurt upon others. And also upon itself. Perhaps this was one of those ways.

He looked down at the bowl between his fanned hands and blinked rapidly. He wasn’t sure if he blinked during this minute he had lost to recounting his day. The froth on his tea by then had mostly flattened and dispersed to the sides in a thin ring of bubbles. The sea-green murk that became uncovered reflected his face, and he caught himself staring at it.

He hastily poured it down the sink and started over.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

To avoid the maddening vagaries of traffic, Chandler left at 7 and was in his office by 7.20. He switched on the lights and watched each tube flutter to life in rapid succession until they were all humming and fully aglow.

While he waited for the kettle to come to a spitting, indiscriminate boil, he nudged the handle of Mansell’s mug, a souvenir from his lads holiday in Tenerife, an inch to the right so it aligned with Kent’s Colour of Bone mug and Miles’s which advertised a friend’s computer repair service. Next to his sat Riley’s, one of several gifted to her by her children, embossed with an ornate ‘M,’ a letter the four of them shared.

He sat down with his tea and began his day by sorting through his inbox. That morning it was worse than usual, inundated by emails from Anderson that relayed minute-by-minute messages from unnamed officials, each whisper-yelling “sensitivity!” and “discretion!” That Anderson expected him to be beholden to them after being booted from the search had him huffing with suspicion and annoyance.

He dropped them all into the appropriate folder. Out of sight, out of… _well_. He remained stubbornly curious and eager to be in the know and to _help_ for god’s sake, but this wasn’t about him. _Move on._ Plenty of people were working to find her. The email he didn’t yet file away was a particularly odd one: a request to keep an eye and ear out for a fellow named James Darby with no explanation provided. The name had never crossed his desk before, and if it had anyone else’s, there clearly was no reason to concern themselves with him. Disappointed that there was nothing there for him to sink his teeth into, he dumped the email into a new folder.

With no open cases on their hands, their daily briefing was uneventful and short. They scattered to their respective corners already discussing what to have for lunch. Hours passed before a phone even rang. Chandler fidgeted with his signet ring — bored and therefore anxious. He sauntered out of his office in search of purpose and found Buchan and Miles watching the CCTV footage of Abigail Ash, the one thing that couldn’t be confiscated.

“Gentlemen,” Chandler pressed.

“I know,” Miles muttered but made no show of actual acknowledgement as Abigail dawdled in front of the station entrance.

Chandler watched himself step out and pass her without paying her any notice, another unforeseeable oversight to add to his store of guilt. He continued up the block and strode past a woman, who was walking in the opposite direction. She was regal, it could be said, poised, and with long, dark hair. She slowed to glance over her shoulder at Chandler.

Miles paused it and turned to him. “Should have got her number.”

“We’re off this so I need you to look into this death at the council estate.”

“Bog-standard OD. I sent Kent and Riley.”

“Bog-standard or not, there’s a dead woman.”

Buchan edged into Chandler’s line of sight. He had that unmistakable gleam in his eye. “She isn’t the first Abigail Ash to have been kidnapped.”

“Ed — “

“Back in 1715 — “

“We don’t know if she was kidnapped.”

“They say she was,” Miles interrupted.

“They actually didn’t say anything.” Chandler couldn’t hide his irritation at that fact.

“It was strongly implied.”

“ _Pirates!_ She was kidnapped by pirates.” The unexpected introduction of pirates into the non-conversation finally drew Chandler’s full attention to Buchan. “Details are a bit hazy. Information from that far back usually is — “

“Ed — “

“Pirates intercepted her ship as it was making its way across the Atlantic — ”

“Ed — “

“And then another group of pirates — “

“Ed — “

“Oh, but, Joe, it is _quite_ the story — ”

“I can vouch,” Miles muttered. “I’ve only heard it three times.”

Chandler put up a hand, silencing Buchan. He affixed a stern gaze to Miles. “Check in with Kent and Riley about this OD.”

Miles closed the window on the computer and returned to his desk. Buchan, his eyes wide, would have burst if he couldn’t pitch this angle soon so Chandler gestured at him to follow him into his office.

“You understand anything you have to tell me about this other Abigail isn’t relevant to us anymore.” Chandler leaned forward. “And pirates? Really, Ed? I think even you’d have difficulty finding a contemporary analogue for pirates with regard to her disappearance.”

“Oh, airplane hijackers maybe?”

“I think we would have heard about airplane hijackers. Besides she never made her flight to Vermont.”

“She could have left by water.”

“On a freighter for an agonizing cross-Atlantic journey?”

“Why not?”

“Look, this isn’t about the failure of anyone’s imagination. With missing persons around her age, more often than not they’ve run away. Naturally we’d all like to know her whereabouts and that she’s safe, but she’s also sixteen. We can’t rule out that she simply left of her own accord.”

“Then why don’t I just do what I used to do? Outside the aegis of any official investigation. Take a little trip to the Maritime Museum perhaps?”

Chandler sighed and straightened the stapler he knocked askew with his elbow. “No claiming the cab fare as an expense.”

Buchan grinned and got up from his seat. “I’ll bring you back something from the gift shop.”

“Please don’t.”

Just as he rushed across the threshold, Chandler asked, “Ed, was she found?”

“Oh, yes. Alive too.”

A necessary clarification in this line of work. Not that that meant anything of course. However history seemed to replicate itself, it never did perfectly, but Chandler permitted himself to derive a little hope from Buchan’s answer.

With enough paperwork, the hours ran easily into each other, and the day faded along with the ringing of phones, the overlapping voices swapping theories and taunts, shoes scuffing the linoleum, requests for signatures, requests for Tesco Express runs, the odd grumble about CPS. During a rare moment of silence, he heard it again. The glug and slap of churning water from his dreams. This went on as if the world around him had stopped, and it crescendoed in volume and flux. He made a grab for his jar of Tiger Balm and hastily twisted off the cap. The sinus-clearing aroma and the mentholated burn squelched the rising sound.

Shift finally over, Chandler declined the customary invitation for drinks. He hadn’t stepped out all day and needed air, space, not the dim lighting and din of a crowded pub. After he saw everyone off, he strolled down to the river, to a pedestrian path lined with luxury flats. 

It was late, but there was still light, that time of day when work ended and leisure began. Joggers huffed and puffed past him, residents took their dogs out for their first piss of the night. Dave, a devoted mudlark, was on the bank, scraping at the muck in search of old bottles and bones. A widowed pensioner, Chandler never saw him joined by anyone, but he always seemed perfectly content to be alone.

He gave Chandler a curt salute.

“Find anything?” Chandler called out.

“Always.”

He held up something pinched between his fingers. As he strode towards Chandler, he suddenly flipped it towards him like a coin. Chandler reflexively caught it. When the sulfurous stench of low-tide shot straight up into his nasal cavities, he immediately regretted doing so. He frantically whipped out a handkerchief and dropped the object into it. His gorge rose at the sight of the crust of sediment and god knows what else he didn’t want to dwell on that obscured its identity.

“What is it?”

“A button. Pewter. Could be Navy. 19th, 18th century.”

“Is that right? Could it be worth much?”

“Nah.”

Chandler motioned to toss it back, but Dave waved him off.

“Yours. Got a hundred like it.”

“Erm.” Chandler swallowed hard and forced a smile. “Ta.”

Dave saluted him again before plodding towards the moorings, stooping here and there to toe something aside or scratch at the ground like a chicken. In the dying light, even the plastic detritus and slime-coated rocks glimmered like precious objects.

Out of earshot now, Chandler could throw the button back onto the bank with just the slightest whiff of guilt. He tilted his open hand to let it slide down the handkerchief but then caught himself. _Was this littering?_ As he contemplated the answer, his fingers slowly curled until they had closed over the button.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

After an overnight soak in disinfectant, the button looked more like it should but with a broken shank and a face as dull as an old nailhead. Irregularly crafted and damaged, it had no obvious place in the carefully constructed environment of his flat. Next to his watch face, the mismatched circles taunted him. As they also did in the container of thumbtacks on his desk. Suddenly realizing what he was wasting his braincells on, he slapped it onto the sill of one of his office windows, far enough not to pester him but close enough to remain in the periphery of his vision should inspiration strike.

With that matter temporarily settled, he returned his attention to James Darby whose stern visage glowered from his monitor. Or rather to the only photographic evidence of him that he could find: an old headshot from when he was promoted to Lieutenant in the Navy. The image, a low-resolution scan of an actual photo, offered little by way of distinctive detail.

He was clean-shaven and pale. That much was obvious. Sideburns suggested his hair was some ordinary shade of brown. A visored hat unhelpfully obscured everything above his eyes. If there was any feature of his that could be called unique, it was the undeniably sensual shape of his upper lip. Chandler narrowed his eyes and brought his face closer to study it, commit it to memory as if he could recognize him solely by that should they happen to run into each other at a Waitrose.

This Darby had no priors. No family. No formal education. Went straight into the Navy at sixteen following a bout in foster care and excelled as far as Chandler could tell. Unceremoniously though he was reassigned to the Falklands then discharged for the vague offense of “misconduct.” After that, he fell off the grid. And that was it, the entire history of this man, who came from nothing and nowhere and seemed to have returned there.

If he was disgruntled enough to pose a threat, why had no official inquiry been initiated? If he was a person of interest, why withhold any relevant case information from him? And why ask him specifically? The whole thing stunk of some backroom favor, the last bloody thing Chandler wanted to be involved in. He closed the browser tab decisively but had tacked the man’s image up in his head.

_What did you do, James Darby?_

The button, which disrupted the straight line of the sill, pulled his eye to it again. He sighed. Bin it or give it to Buchan. Why did he even keep it in the first place? Chandler’s focus shifted from it to the window above then beyond that to an unfamiliar figure studying one of the whiteboards. Standing straight as a pin, he had close-cropped hair and was dressed in a suit that Chandler noticed was definitely not off-the-peg. He was stroking his neat, startlingly orange beard and positively reeking of authority.

“Oh for god’s sake,” Chandler grumbled.

He stalked out of his office and up to the man.

“Your lot already came and took what they wanted. If you have additional requisitions I need to be notified about them in advance and through the proper channels.”

Chandler readied himself to be slapped back with the usual Home Office dick-swinging, but the man responded instead with no response at all. His unblinking eyes went a bit wide and terribly, unnervingly soft. They were blue, a different shade than his — no, they were green, but everything looked a bit green under those awful lights. Chandler’s gaze dropped to his slightly open mouth and lingered there as he wondered about the upper lip beneath that mustache.

If this was some power move, it wasn’t one Chandler had encountered before, but it was an effective one, and he found himself taking a step back. The man grinned and released a gruff but friendly laugh. He put out a hand.

“James Barlow. I’m supposed to be meeting Ed Buchan.”

Chandler slipped his hands into his trouser pockets instead of shaking it. “DI Chandler. Non-staff aren’t permitted in here. You ought to be waiting at reception.”

“In my defense, there was no one there. Security is surprisingly lax here. You should probably see to that. And those flickering lights. I wasn’t sure if I’d entered a police station or a village disco.”

Chandler’s instinct was to defend the station against this outsider, but he himself had been haranguing operations about these very problems. Adding insult to injury, every tap in the gents dripped now.

“Mansell, can you call Ed? And tell him his guest, Mr. Barlow, is here.”

“Right, boss.”

“I couldn’t help noticing this picture over here. ‘Raft of Medusa,’ is it? Someone on staff must be a bit of an aesthete.”

“Normally people notice the photos of the corpses and not much else.” Chandler plucked the drawing off the board before inserting himself between it and Barlow. “An old case. I sometimes find existing references helpful when trying to make sense of the senseless.”

“So you’re the aesthete. I should have guessed.” He glanced down at Chandler’s waistcoat. “Why Kippenberger and not Géricault?”

“That is not information you are privy to.”

The man gestured loosely at the file box on the floor under Mansell’s desk. On the side of it in Sharpie was the name “Isabella” in quotation marks. Chandler pursed his lips to contain a scolding. He had told Mansell to take that down to storage last week.

“Someone’s fiancé end up under the herb garden?”

“ _Oh._ ” The line of tension that had been running up Chandler’s back slackened. “You know Keats?”

“Boss, Buchan’s running a bit late. Lost a — I don’t know, something. I stopped listening halfway through.”

“Thank you. And do take that box down now.”

“Yeah, sorry, will do.” He promptly swept it up into his arms. As he passed Riley’s desk, she elbowed him in the side and nodded towards them.

“Good thing Kent’s out, eh?”

Mansell looked back at them and let out a rolling, smarmy laugh.

Barlow leaned in, close enough for Chandler to see that he was blanketed in freckles. “Do they know we can see them staring at us?”

“I apologize. Whenever my team sees me talking to anyone attractive, they suddenly develop an outsized interest in my personal life.”

“You must have quite the personal life.”

“Quite the lack of one anyway.”

“You think I’m attractive?”

“Ah — compared to the cast of characters that typically comes through our doors, I suppose, yes. Objectively speaking of course. I could have someone take a survey around the station if my answer doesn’t satisfy you.”

Barlow smiled. “Consider me satisfied.”

Chandler might never figure out how to react to jests like this so he just laughed. Judging by Riley and Mansell’s pained expressions, a bit too exuberantly. He cleared his throat and shifted his eyes to a photo of a necrotic hand in a pool of blood.

“Oi, stop faffing around, you two,” Miles barked as he entered the room.

Riley swiftly resumed transcribing her notes. Mansell toddled off with the box. Miles gave Chandler and Barlow a full once-over from head to toe then back up again before throwing himself into his chair. He began to furiously two-finger stab his keyboard and mutter under his breath.

“Mr. Barlow!” Buchan scuttled in excitedly. “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting. Somehow misplaced my ID in mid-19th-century mysticism. I see you’ve already met our fearless leader. Joe, I ran into this incredible chap at the museum. He’s doing research for a book on the Golden Age of piracy. Just our luck, eh?”

“Indeed.”

“Now allow me to show you to my domain. I should warn you though that we are experiencing a slight, recurring problem with mold,” Buchan said cheerfully as he led Barlow out. When they passed through the doors, Barlow turned and raised his hand in farewell. 

“Boss.”

Chandler returned the gesture, but the door had already closed behind him.

“ _Boss._ ”

Knowing Buchan’s ability to worm his way into people’s lives and latch onto them until he was tolerated, he figured the odds of Barlow reappearing were high.

“Joe!”

“What is it?” Chandler snapped.

“That’s one way to put yourself up on the board.”

Chandler jerked away from the whiteboard he was leaning against to find his sleeve attached to it by strands of sticky tack.

“Oh — _oh, damn it._ ”

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

For the second time in the past month, they were called to Haverhill House. Slumped on the floor against the sofa, a hair elastic around the arm, needle still cradled in the hand, at first glance, like the earlier OD four floors down, there was nothing amiss. Kent and Riley were fully prepared to take an early lunch when a SOCO spotted crusted blood in her hair at the base of the skull. There was no sign though that she had struck her head while nodding off. It wasn’t much to go on but enough to rule the death suspicious.

Cause of death it turned out was asphyxiation due to blunt force trauma to the head. According to toxicology, a femoral blood sample indicated that the heroin in her system hadn’t circulated. She was dead before it had been injected. Chandler flipped to the next page which included a photograph of a bright red fleck. Paint with traces of iron and carbon — steel.

The victim, Muriel Tanning, was twenty-nine, worked two menial jobs, sober for three years after a short stint at an inpatient facility. No known family or significant other. She was by most people’s standards no one but was young enough, pretty enough, and white for the press to run with the story. Media attention was rarely welcome, and now the conservative talking heads and papers had quickly turned the deaths at Haverhill House into a rallying cry to demolish it and end council housing altogether.

Chandler ran a hand over his face. _Focus_ , don’t pay politics any mind, cancel out the noise.

Miles abruptly knocked on a window, rattling all the panes. So much for that. He enunciated, “Go home.” 

Chandler nodded his acknowledgement then waved congenially until Miles exited his line of sight. It was, of course, late.

End-of-shift routine completed, he threw his coat and scarf on and slipped the button into his pocket. Maybe it had a home in the purely decorative wooden box on the hallway table or the purely decorative bowl of stones in his bathroom. As he turned into the corridor, more possibilities accumulating in his head, he nearly collided with — 

“Terribly sorry.”

— James Barlow.

“Detective Inspector.”

“God, you’re still here?”

“As you can see. Your Ed has a _lot_ to talk about. He’s down there if you want to pry him loose and toss him in a cab.”

“Best not to disturb him. He’ll be too eager to repeat what you two discussed, and before I know it I’ll be bedding down among the boxes like a shop cat.”

“After all of that, how 18th-century pirates can assist you with your work eludes me.”

“And it shall continue to.”

“You’ve no interest in the topic yourself?”

“Pirates? I’ve been to the Prospect of Whitby once with my sergeant. Does that count as interest?”

“It’s got to start somewhere. Since I’m in the area, I was thinking of dropping by the site of the old Execution Dock and, you know, commune with the spirits of pirates.”

“Ah, like…Captain Kidd.”

“Yes. And not just pirates. Lawless reprobates of all kind. Your people, one could say. You should join me. You may be inspired.”

Chandler was feeling comfortably tired and had a book Buchan recommended waiting for him at home, so something must have possessed him — the spirit of a pirate perhaps — to accept his invitation. 

“Why not?”

Barlow led them to the top of Wapping Old Stairs. The tide had risen, and water slapped angrily at its moss-covered steps. The area was desolate, and the air suitably chilly. The night seemed to paint the city in an extra layer of its own dark history.

Any evidence of the dock was long gone, but Chandler could picture it clearly in his mind. He could even hear the deafening roar of the onlookers’ jeers like he was there. With a noose resting on his collar, the pirate, unrepentant, lobbed insults back at them and the attending chaplain. The drop was short, deliberately so. Sometimes the more depraved offenders were denied the immediate death of a broken neck as he had learned from Buchan. Chandler was aware of how long strangulation could take, certainly longer than what you saw in movies. Minutes passed before his thrashing dwindled to twitching, before his dangling toes which, when they finally stilled, dipped into the river. Chandler shivered. Buchan sure could tell a story.

“The bodies.”

“What?”

Chandler pinched the bridge of his nose. “They kept them in — what were they called?”

“Gibbets.”

“Gibbets. They left the bodies on display, didn’t they? Some for years. Barbaric.”

“Developing sympathy for pirates, are you?”

“Let’s say I haven’t much tolerance today for making examples of the dead.”

Barlow sighed. “I suppose this is a rather macabre way of spending your free time. Come on, I’ll buy you a drink. As compensation.”

The sudden onset of rain drove them into an upscale but casual bar nearby that was housed in one of the newer developments. They took a seat in the corner from where they could see Tower Bridge. Chandler promptly offered Barlow a dollop of hand sanitizer.

“I haven’t been in London for years. This whole area has changed quite a bit.”

“Even during the few I’ve been working in Whitechapel.”

“Richer, whiter. Costlier. I’m surprised that tower block in Whitechapel hasn’t been replaced by overpriced gimcrack flats already. Although I’m sure plans to are in the works. I read somewhere that someone bought a whole block of maisonettes next to it. Just like that.”

“Gentrification is inevitable. It’ll probably come for most neighborhoods so long as there’s a tube station.”

“Is it?”

“What?”

“Inevitable?”

“Well, the forces of the market have made it so.”

“The market,” Barlow scoffed. “It’s another form of colonization if you ask me. The wealthy displacing the poor from increasingly valuable land then paying them a pittance to labor on it for them.”

“I think I’m starting to understand your predilection for pirates.”

“I didn’t grow up with much. And when you don’t, it’s hard to ignore the baked-in class system designed to keep the underprivileged as that and those who preserve it permanently aloft.”

“You’ve done all right for yourself, haven’t you?”

“Not without unnecessarily extraordinary effort.” Barlow gave a non-committal shrug and swallowed a mouthful of whisky. “I was a sailor. That’s when the fascination with pirates began. Sailors in those days turned to piracy, because it was one of the few available alternatives to hard labor for meager wages. They had a chance at a more prosperous, even a more equitable life. But also short-lived. The desperate often have to take those kinds of risks.”

Chandler twiddled with his ring. He had heard similar lines of discourse aplenty, occasionally directed at him in much cruder language, and knew better than to echo any of it as if he truly understood. Whatever his own struggles had been, none were related to money that’s for sure. And whatever Barlow’s story was, Chandler didn’t need to hear all of it to know it wasn’t an easy one. He wiped up the condensation that had pooled around his glass of mineral water and nodded.

Chandler could see that Barlow sensed his unease, but then he wasn’t very good at hiding it. Barlow smiled, and the mood instantly shifted. Chandler couldn’t help smiling back and nudged the sodden napkin aside.

“I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be.”

“I’ve heard worse. CID isn’t exactly full of people like me.”

“Which begs the question, why is someone like you down in the trenches instead of warming an Aeron chair at Home Office?”

“I like to think that investigative work suits me. It’s a hell of lot more fulfilling than navigating the minefield of politics that my superiors have to.”

“I hate to break it to you, Chandler, but it’s all political.”

“Joe.”

“Joe? Ah.” Barlow smiled broadly. “Joe.”

“Hearing you call me by my surname is giving me unpleasant flashbacks to school.”

“All right then, Joe. Though you’re more of a Chandler, aren’t you?”

“Don’t you dare think of calling me Joseph. Only my mother did.”

“As long as you don’t call me Jim.”

“Jim? Jim Barlow. No, I don’t like the sound of that at all.”

“Neither do I.”

“Speaking of pirates, does Conrad give Lord Jim a surname? I can’t remember.”

Barlow shook his head. “I don’t think so. Although it’s been a while since I’ve read that book.”

Chandler chortled into his glass.

“What’s so amusing?”

“It’s not everyday I meet someone who understands my references.”

“I like to read. I like art. Lots of people do. You were bound to meet one of us eventually.”

“I…I’m glad I did.”

Barlow polished off his drink then pointed to Chandler’s. 

“Tempt you with anything harder?”

“Oh. No. Thank you though. The rain’s eased up so I should be on my way.”

Out on the pavement, Barlow pointedly extended his hand. Chandler tucked both of his into his coat pockets in a bid to wind him up. While the unclasped hand remained stubbornly raised between them, Barlow’s smile grew wider and wider until they were both chuckling. Conceding finally, Chandler took it. The fleshy warmth of it came as a strange shock, and he just barely suppressed the impulse to recoil. Of course Barlow’s hand would be fleshy and warm. He was alive after all. A living mammal. Like him, a fellow living mammal. Like a squirrel. Or a…

A walrus.

Clearly Chandler had been around too many dead bodies.

A beat too many passed for their hands to still be joined. Chandler rushed to take his phone out of his pocket to deflect any awkwardness. As he did, something struck the cobbles with a plink. The button. Chandler swiftly retrieved it and shoved it back into his pocket. He winced, thinking of the wet grime he just introduced to the lining of his cashmere coat.

Barlow eyed him curiously. When no explanation came, he smirked.

“Keep your secrets, Joe. I’ll see you around.”

“Yes. Well…you know where I work.”

Without turning around, Barlow gave him a coolly nonchalant wave. Chandler’s hand tightened around his phone as he watched him walk away.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Haverhill House was a brutalist tower block typical of the time of its construction. It stood in the center of Whitechapel like a one-finger salute to the tide of gentrification encroaching upon it. From time to time they’d be called there for usually nothing out of the ordinary. The occasional domestic or threats over excessively loud music. As a formality, their presences had graced heart attacks, deadly slips in the bath, an accidental electrocution once, and lastly Muriel.

Her next-door neighbor cleared a box from her sofa for Miles and Chandler to sit before resuming wrapping dishes in newspaper. Miles planted the full breadth of himself in the middle, not having missed Chandler’s fleeting look of horror at the cat-hair-flecked upholstery.

“So why’m I being asked about Muriel again? Curly-haired bloke’s already been by.”

“Reconfirming some details. Won’t be long. Moving, are you?”

“Can’t take this shit heap anymore. Heating’s fucked. Water’s fucked. Now the council’s saying Corbin can’t get nothing done until you lot are finished with — “ She waved a dish about. “ — this business with Muriel. Like he was doing much in the first place.”

“The cameras — “

“Yeah, imagine if he bothered getting them fixed. Case closed, am I right?” She picked up her geriatric cat and kissed its head. “All these coppers and reporters trying to catch us on our own steps. I feel like I’ve done something wrong just by living here. So I’m off to my sister’s. Can’t wait another ten years for a spot somewhere else to open up.”

“How well did you know Ms. Tanning?” Chandler asked.

“Enough to trust her to feed Wiggles here once in a while. She’s all right. Was — sorry. She never did ask for anything in return.”

“You ever see any visitors of hers?”

“Visitors? No. She worked then came home. Even I go out for drinks once in a while, but she — ” 

The clanging of pipes suddenly kicked up all around them, drowning her out. The cat lived up to its name and slipped from her arms to hide under the sofa. Miles and Chandler looked at each other aghast at the commotion which had also set off a chorus of barking dogs and squalling babies. The tenant put her hand on her hip and let out an unheard sigh. She scrolled through her phone as they waited this out. A few minutes later, it ceased. Another few passed before the dogs and babies followed suit.

She tossed her phone down on a pile of laundry.

“Jesus Christ, what the hell was that?”

“Ghosts. Building’s haunted.”

Miles side-eyed Chandler who stood a little straighter.

Brushing off her joke, Chandler commented calmly, “That’s a common occurrence I gather.” 

“Common? Try every day at 3 when the heat finally comes on. Walls are like paper. You can hear every damn fart and flush. They think because we don’t have much, they don’t have to give us anything decent.”

“So on the day Ms. Tanning died, you were at home?”

“Yeah. Had a blessed half day off. Caught up on my Netflix.”

“You didn’t hear anything unusual?”

“No. She was always quiet. I assumed she’d have a kip before she left for her other job. People come and go all the time. Kids hanging out everywhere, smoking weed. Shit like that. There wasn’t, like, fighting or shouting or anything if that’s what you’re wondering about. You know…normal.”

Miles glanced at Chandler.

“Well, thanks for your time, love. Good luck with your move.”

“‘Course. If someone done her in, I hope you get him.”

“We do too.”

They stepped out onto the landing and headed towards the stairwell.

“Didn’t Llewellyn say that Muriel had been dead for approximately 26 hours? Which could make the time of death somewhere between 2 and 4.”

“So if there was a confrontation, and it occurred at 3, who the hell would have heard it over that fucking bedlam?”

“No one Kent and Riley talked to on this floor said they saw anyone suspicious. And if people are constantly coming and going, good chance someone would have noticed anyone trying to force their way in.”

“But no one did.”

“So it had to have been someone Muriel knew. Someone who might have also knew about the heating. Another tenant?”

They turned down into the stairwell.

“Buchan’s new friend, eh?” Miles asked.

“Who? Oh. What about him?”

“I’m a detective. I see things. And what I saw was you looking at him like he was cake, and it was your eighth birthday.”

“I was not looking at him like he was — _cake_.”

“Good thing Kent was out.”

“What?”

Miles knocked on the door to the flat directly below Muriel’s. “Police. We’d like to ask you some questions about your upstairs neighbor.”

As they waited for a response, Chandler added, “He knows Keats. How many Keats enthusiasts am I going to meet on this job?”

“Jesus, every fifth person’s got a degree in English lit. This one might like your Keats too.”

The curtain was thrust aside by a girl in a pink headscarf. She eyeballed their warrant cards disapprovingly then their faces even more so before letting the curtain fall back in place.

“What do you want?”

“We’re inquiring about your upstairs neighbor, Muriel Tanning,” Chandler replied.

“You can’t question me without an adult present. I’ve seen _The Wire_.”

Miles pulled an incredulous face. “Is she really using an American TV show as her point of legal reference?”

“She isn’t wrong.”

“Mind telling us when your mum or dad’s coming home?” Miles asked.

“I ain’t telling you. _Pig_.”

Chandler and Miles winced. 

“Oh dear.”

“You lot cause as much trouble, so you two can fuck right off.”

Chandler gawped. Since Miles was less forgiving towards smart-ass kids who weren’t his own, he tugged at his sleeve to move on.

“Sorry to bother you. We’ll come back when someone else is home.”

“Someone with better manners hopefully. Christ, if my little one grows up to have a fucking mouth like hers.”

“Never mind her. Why weren’t you able to interview the handyman? Corbin, is it?”

Miles grunted. “I caught him while he was going into a lift. He shouted that he was busy, call the council and whatnot, the dodgy bastard.”

“Have we heard from Lewellyn about the rubbish they cleared from downstairs?”

Miles glanced at his phone. “Nothing yet.”

“Let’s check in with her then.”

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Chandler gave a short sniff when the pickled air stung his nostrils. They were spared this time the attendant corpse and lain between him and Llewellyn on an examination table was a red pipe wrench.

“We got a murder weapon or what?” Miles asked.

“Yes, we do.” Llewellyn circled the curve of the tool’s hook jaw. “After filtering out all the other biological matter, we found tissue that belonged to Ms. Tanning. It also corresponds very nicely with the size and shape of the fracture. He’d manage to strike her in just the perfect place for a bone fragment to pierce the brain stem.”

“Any prints?” 

“Two partials. Our culprit missed a spot in their panic.”

“Excellent. We’ll have Mansell check it against the database. Maybe the perpetrator has priors.”

“It’s a fucking wrench. It’s obviously that handyman.”

“Thank you, Caroline.”

In the corridor, Chandler took in a lungful of the stale basement air.

“Why don’t we just cut to the chase and punch in Corbin’s name first. For a laugh. You know I’m good for it.”

“ _Fine_.” Chandler glanced at his watch. “Oh. Damn. I forgot I promised Ed lunch.”

Miles let out a guffaw of schadenfreude. “You’re the boss. Cancel.”

“I’ve already canceled twice. Get on Mansell about the fingerprints, and call me if anything turns up. Otherwise I’ll be back in thirty — twenty.”

Fifteen, he’d actually told himself. He peevishly huffed when he opened the door to the cafe. As usual, it reeked of burnt chip grease, which he suspected was holding the whole raggedy place together, but it was a favorite of Buchan’s. Upon spotting Chandler, he waved him over.

“Joe, you made it.”

Chandler glanced down at the seat of the chair before sitting. It would be some time before Mansell might find a match if it wasn’t Corbin, but he held onto his phone like it would buzz any second. With the other, he shifted the napkin dispenser to line up with the edge of the table and the salt and pepper shakers next to it in a more pleasing arrangement.

“So Mr. Barlow and I — “

“Do you have his number?”

“Wha— ? Oh, yes. I can give it to you later.”

“Now please.”

“ _Oh_. Oh. All right then.”

Slightly unsettled, Buchan became all fiddly fingers and nearly dropped his phone in the puddle of gravy on his plate. Chandler said nothing as he waited to receive it. Once he did, he exhaled and sat back with a smile.

“How are you, Ed?”

“Excellent. Marvelous. If you’re busy, we can reschedule.”

“Oh, it’s that I have a — a button, you see, which I thought he might be able enlighten me about.”

“A button. Of course. Vitally important business, buttons. They do hold much of our lives together after all.”

Buchan’s head bobbed as he mused in silence. No doubt he was dredging up all the local lore he could from his mental archive that involved…buttons.

“I’ve just fifteen minutes, Ed.”

“Sorry, yes! Mr. Barlow — “

“James.”

“Yes, James. He knew more about Abigail with an ‘e’ than all the documentation I could find. And her father.” Buchan’s eyes widened. “He does not like him.”

“Let’s focus on Abigail.”

“So like I said before, she was kidnapped by pirates who held her for ransom. Ironically she was also rescued by pirates — other pirates, that is. They returned her to her father who decided to show his gratitude by arresting and then trying them for…well, being pirates. They were able to escape and retaliate, and the result was the Sacking of Charles Town, 7 May 1715. The pirates rained hellfire upon the square, a great conflagration that could be seen all up and down the coast. Some have said —“

“Ed.”

“Yes, yes. Young Abigail fortunately was sent away ahead of it to Georgia. Eventually she returned to England to claim what was left of the estate. After that, she supposedly became a staunch abolitionist and advocate for the poor but had operated under a pseudonym. Scholarship has only recently started to make the connection.”

“Why do we think she took the leap from nobleman’s daughter to sub rosa activist?”

“While slavery was nominally banned in England, it was of course thriving in the colonies. She might have seen things that did not sit well with her. Perhaps among them the rank hypocrisy of the Empire.”

Chandler nodded. “And the pirates who returned her? They didn’t ask for a ransom?”

“According to Mr. Barlow — James, no.”

“Huh. If Abigail without an ‘e’ is on a crusade against injustice, she’s doing it awfully quietly.”

“Or hasn’t begun yet. Considering her father’s politics, it wouldn’t be especially surprising if she turned out the opposite of him. We’ve all gone through our rebellious phase as teenagers now, haven’t we? Or, erm…not.”

“If she was taken, her kidnappers haven’t made any demands as far as I know. Or as far as the Commander has been willing to intimate to me.”

Chandler sighed and rubbed his forehead, unsure of what to do with this information. Buchan’s half-eaten pie with its pebbles of grey meat in congealing suet and the flaking crust like psoriatic skin started to curdle his stomach.

“Have you eaten, Joe? You’re looking a bit out of sorts.”

“No, not yet. As you’re aware, after a murder we need to cover as much ground as quickly as possible. Write up what you have and leave it on my desk,” he said as he got to his feet. “I apologize for being late.”

“You’re sure you don’t want a bite of my — “

Chandler shook his head and offered Buchan a queasy but reassuring smile.

He was kind to offer. After all, Chandler did need food. And water. And rest.

_Rest._

When he returned to the station, Miles was in his office. Ankle slung over his knee, his foot bounced with agitation. A carrier bag was on Chandler’s desk. He lifted a flap to peek inside. Two onigiri and a packet of jelly babies sat inside. A strange combination that reflected them rather perfectly.

“Fortification.”

“For what?”

Miles presented a printout with flourish. “Our partial prints matched the fingerprints of one handyman of Haverhill House. Two previous arrests, one for disorderly behavior and guess what the other was for?”

“Drug possession.”

“Class B. With intent to sell.”

“All right, let’s get everything we can to CPS now.” Chandler tipped the bag of jelly babies into his mouth. He grimaced as he chewed.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Corbin yawned loudly, baring all of his teeth. He tipped his head back and gazed with enormous interest at the ceiling, avoiding eye contact as if Chandler and Miles weren’t worthy of it. When he scratched his bristly chin, his sleeve tugged down and revealed his watch, a shiny new Patek that Chandler estimated came with a £30,000 price tag. He pulled his cuff back over it and crossed his arms. The suit his lawyer wore made it clear he hadn’t been dispatched by the DSCC.

“He’s my cousin,” Corbin joked. No one laughed.

“You sure you want to represent him?” Miles asked the lawyer.

“According to the victim’s phone records, Muriel Tanning called you five times on the 17th, 21st, 23rd of September and twice on 27th. What about?”

“I don’t remember. Stuff. You know, probably to change a lightbulb and whatnot. Stuff.”

“You don’t remember what she called you five times in ten days about?”

“I got to deal with a lot of tenants. They’re always whinging about this and that. I can’t keep track.”

“On the 8th of October between the hours of 14.00 and 16.00, were you in the Muriel Tanning’s flat?”

Corbin shrugged. “Don’t remember — ”

Miles loudly and purposefully cleared his throat. Corbin flinched then audibly swallowed.

“She had a leak under her bathroom sink. The downstairs neighbors claimed to have complained to you about this as well since water was coming through their ceiling.”

“Sure.”

“Do you often have to deal with pipes?”

“Yeah. Sometimes.”

“Don’t you need a pipe wrench to deal with pipes?”

Corbin guffawed. “The fuck do you know about dealing with pipes?”

“Do you need a pipe wrench to deal with pipes?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why don’t you have one? We searched your workroom.”

“Could have been nicked. Could have misplaced it. Happens.”

“Down a refuse chute perhaps?”

“Detective Inspector, can you just misplace a pipe wrench down a refuse chute?” Miles asked.

“I can’t imagine you could, Detective Sergeant.”

Chandler straightened the folder on the table and pulled out a photo of the wrench.

“Does this belong to you, Mr. Corbin?”

He turned his head away and shrugged. 

“Please look at the photograph, Mr. Corbin.”

He glanced at it and shrugged again.

“Answer the question.”

“Could be. _Don’t_. _Know_.”

The lawyer leaned in. “Detective Inspector, that is a wrench you can purchase at any hardware shop. Unless my client has his name written on it, I don’t see what the connection to him is.”

Miles and Chandler glanced at each other before setting both their sights on him. Grasping the situation, he swiftly withdrew his phone from his jacket pocket as he left the room. Corbin looked at the two them, his brow furrowed and his head cocked rather like a dog. Miles met his confusion with an expression of mock bewilderment.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

They were far from done, but they started to feel closer, and whenever they did, the possibility of everything going pear-shaped loomed larger. Miles ordered Chandler to clock off early, offering to wrap things up around the office for him. For once, Chandler listened and left without bestowing Miles a task list the length of his arm. Right as he shut himself in his car, Kent zipped in on his scooter, returning from another call. They gave each other a curt wave as Chandler pulled out of the car park.

He put a pot of water on the stove and set a timer on his phone. As he sorted the mail by size and significance, his eyes traveled down his hand to his watch. A Tag Heuer, it was practically utilitarian compared to Corbin’s. His eyes traveled further down to his cufflink. Cartier, his grandfather’s. Then to the cuff itself, cut and sewn to his measurements and exacting preferences. He twinged at the absurdly high cost of this kind of control, which he paid with little thought. When people like him existed, what right did anyone have to judge Corbin for that watch? But where did all that money come from? From whose coffers? Was it that unreasonable to kill someone for that kind of money, considering how the rich and therefore powerful have been rewarded for far worse? And what reward did Corbin’s patron receive from this? All of this Chandler pondered as he pictured Muriel’s corpse, her flat, her bank records listing her debts and paltry credits. The sum of one unlucky life.

He threw in two handfuls of campanelle into the boiling water and set a new timer. He turned on the news. They were airing footage of Ash, that photo of his daughter inset above his head, at the International Property Awards gala where he was honored last month. Beneath the newsreader’s flat delivery, Chandler could hear Ash denouncing council housing as breeding grounds for crime and depressants to local economies then calling for the privatization of public property, tax abatements for developers, the unfettered construction of luxury homes. A rising tide to lift all ships, etc., etc., so on and so forth. He capped this conservative fever dream with an appeal to support his reelection among scattered boos.

Chandler muted the sound. If Abigail without an ‘e’ should turn out anything like Abigail with an ‘e,’ maybe her future was in the expansion of affordable housing.

He checked his phone to see how much time he had left. There were no new messages, no after-hours work emails. A rare occurrence. He opened the text thread with Buchan and stared at the number he provided until the screen dimmed from inactivity.

Confident that Buchan would follow up about the button, he snapped a photo of it.

\- _This is DI Chandler. I got your number from Ed Buchan. I hope you don’t mind._

He swallowed hard before sending the photo to Barlow.

_\- Was told this could be 18th century Navy. Doubtful. Look like anything to you?_

The glass top of his dining table clanked frightfully when he slapped his phone facedown on it.

“What the hell are you doing?”

He ran a hand through his hair. He thought of Miles and Judy and the little one. Even the fish. He thought of Riley and her husband and their identically raucous laughter. Mansell (reluctantly) and whoever he was trying to pull tonight. And Kent and his flatmates or his mate-mates if they weren’t both, and the music he might be listening to. He thought of McCormack’s family. He thought of Abigail and Muriel.

The dinging of his phone flung him clear out of his mind and nearly out of his skin into the next room. His fingers scrabbled to turn it over.

_\- I’d have to see it in person. If you want to come by now I have a roast in the oven._

Chandler stared at the bubble of text until his brain spat: _Respond!_

\- _OK_

A brilliant reply. Truly. Barlow’s address, which was in the next neighborhood over, promptly followed.

Chandler glanced over his shoulder at the pot of boiling pasta.

_Shit._

He turned the stove off and chucked the pot into the sink. He slipped on his coat and grabbed his keys. After shutting the door, he reopened it, toed off his shoes, and ran back inside. He snatched the button off the dining table then checked the stove again on his way out. With the door locked, he stared at the knob. Was he really doing this? He twisted it. It stopped short as it should have. He took a deep breath, twisted it once more to make absolutely, positively sure that it was locked. Another breath and another twist until it felt right in his bones.

He came up the street to a red brick row house. There was a “TO LET” sign in the ground floor window. Barlow greeted him with a smile. Dressed in jeans and a shawl-collared jumper, he looked considerably less severe than on the day they met. Chandler immediately regretted not changing his clothes.

He held out a bottle of wine and announced, “I don’t really drink. Anymore.”

Barlow cocked an eyebrow at him before taking it. “Come in.”

The small flat screamed “mid-priced Airbnb” with its palette of whites and grays; cheap, generically modern furniture of blond wood; and a motley collection of books probably abandoned by previous tenants and guests. A lone succulent sat on a window sill.

As if he had read Chandler’s mind, Barlow said, “Don’t judge me by the decor. I’m temporarily occupying someone else’s life right now.”

While Barlow hung up his coat, Chandler stood there, surveying the open floor plan, and breathed out.

It was immaculate.

“ _Ohthankgod_ ,” he whispered to himself.

“Hm? Did you say something?”

“I was thanking you for seeing me on such short notice.”

Barlow handed him a glass of mineral water and gestured to the sofa. He pushed aside a laptop and an old leather-bound book to set a coaster down on the coffee table.

“Are you going somewhere?”

“Are you detecting, Detective?”

“I couldn’t help noticing the bag by the door.”

“I’m planning on taking some short trips to the coast while I’m here. It’ll be more efficient to keep my life in that bag.”

“Efficiency is…good.” Chandler brought the glass to his lips and privately congratulated himself on his mastery of small talk. “So what I texted you about…”

When he reached into his jacket pocket, Barlow pressed his fingertips against his forearm, stopping him.

“Dinner first.”

“Of course,” Chandler murmured softly as if his touch had sapped all of his nervous energy.

Barlow went to the kitchen to tend to the aforementioned roast. With his back turned to him, Chandler took the opportunity to adjust the book on the coffee table so that it lay straighter. He tilted his head to peer at the spine and stiffened when his eyes fell on the title. They remained there, unblinking, until Barlow called him to join him at the table.

“It’s so easy to recognize a lover of books. They can’t resist knowing what someone else is reading.”

“I didn’t mean to be nosy.”

“Have you read it?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“If you want, you can borrow it.”

Chandler smiled. “Maybe.”

By the time they’d finished eating, Barlow had gone through most of the bottle on his own. They returned to the sofa where he sprawled out on one end all loose-limbed, his cheeks tinged pink and his eyes bright. Chandler had finally removed his jacket.

“Since you don’t live here anymore, where do you live?”

“If your area of expertise is piracy in the 18th century, the Bahamas are where you need to be. The first year was utter misery for this ginger though.”

“And, what, you’re back to research the opposition?”

“That’s one reason. A friend I’d fallen out of touch with a long time ago got in contact with me recently. She sent me a news clip about someone we both knew from a while back. So another reason is that I was hoping to see him.”

“Your ex.”

“Funny, I’ve never considered him an ex.” He rested his wineglass against his chin. “My fear is that, because he’s in such a different place than me, this trip’ll end up being a fruitless venture. Personally speaking.”

“I wish I could provide you with some reassurance, but, unfortunately for you, no one is more clueless than me when it comes to matters of the heart. It would be obvious to even the most oblivious that you care about him.”

“Yes. I do.”

There was a far-off look in his eyes now. Undoubtedly his memories of this man were tugging his attention inward. Chandler’s interrogation instincts started to kick in, and he itched to know who his ex was and why he was on the news, what had fallen between them that they were an ocean apart, and what one had to be like and had to do to be loved like that. _If only I knew_ , Chandler thought. _If only I knew how_. But they were barely acquainted with each other for him to pry like that.

“So this button of yours.”

“Oh, yes.”

Barlow plucked it from his open hand. His fingers brushed his palm, and there was that odd sensation again. Chandler closed his hand into a fist as if he could trap it inside and take it with him.

Barlow walked over to the floor lamp and angled its head to see better.

“It’s a plain old pewter button. Ten-a-penny. If it was Navy, it could have belonged to an officer who wasn’t from a wealthy family. They had to pay for their own uniforms so a less-moneyed fellow might have skimped on buttons. What is this to you anyway? An heirloom? A good luck charm?”

“An object of inexplicable curiosity.”

“Like why Ed is researching Abigail Ashe while the current one is missing? You did tell me that existing references helped you make sense of the senseless.”

“Let me emphatically state that we have no involvement with that case. So please don’t put much stock into Ed’s research.”

“You must if you haven’t put an end to it.”

He knew he shouldn’t say. “Her father,” he said anyway.

“Her father,” Barlow repeated.

“Ed made it clear you’re no fan of Peter Ashe with an ‘e.’”

“Not a fan either of the one without an ‘e.’”

“He is a bit awful, isn’t he?”

“If a Tory can be a bit awful.”

Barlow sat back down and placed the button on the coffee table.

“Peter Ash’s father claimed to be the great great great second cousin or something of Lord Ashe, but that’s complete bollocks. Wanted that sheen of old money, I guess.”

“Why don’t you tell me about that Ashe?”

“The first Baron Ashe?” Barlow shrugged. “Since his peerage was new and lower-tier at that, he didn’t have the wealth and influence he thought he was due. Since he was a pretty ambitious guy, he ingratiated himself to richer, more powerful men. Successfully too.”

“Much like this Peter Ash.”

“Yep. He eventually got what he wanted and was appointed Governor of a colony in what’s now the U.S. Once there, he had a good view of how much more power he could have but also what pirates in the New World were capable of. His chief benefactor was even killed by pirates. He embarked on a merciless campaign against them. Not out of retribution. That relationship was purely transactional. He was worried about the threat pirates posed to him. So he hanged as many as he could, just not the pirates he needed to.”

“What happened?”

“One he had captured, a Captain Flint, was friends with Ashe before he became a pirate. He was the one who returned his daughter to him in a show of good faith. But Ashe was way too invested in protecting himself and had every intention of hanging him anyway. With the aid of another pirate captain, Flint escaped during a melee in which Ashe was killed.”

 _Captain Flint… Like in Treasure Island?_ Chandler scratched his cheek. This information was hardly clarifying.

“The pirates killed him?”

“In his own town square where he was going to hang Flint.”

_So is Ash worried about…a pirate?_

Barlow tipped his head back to finish the last of the wine. As much as he wanted to hear more, Chandler took the empty bottle and the late hour as his cues to leave.

With the evening decidedly over, Chandler only then realized how at ease he had been. When Barlow opened the front door, a gust of cold night air seemed to urge him to retreat into his company for a bit longer, but sleep beckoned. Work beckoned. They waited together on the front steps for his lift, chatting idly and making plans to meet up with Buchan for lunch.

Without a single drop of alcohol in him but his endorphins rioting, Chandler couldn’t say he was drunk but felt like something close to it. His senses and his brain, when they connected, did haphazardly, clumsily, and without the necessary immediacy. In the back of the car, he smiled uncontrollably to himself, not understanding why exactly and not being especially bothered by that.

It wasn’t until he arrived at his flat that the grid like a net fell over his world again, and he’d arrange his life according to the lines and boxes it laid out for him. He placed his shoes perpendicular to the interior wall of the hall closet and hung his coat perfectly centered on a hanger. His phone and watch, joined by the button, were laid side-by-side on his bedside table. His suit was slotted into the waiting gap in his bedroom closet. He deposited his shirt in one basket, his socks and underwear in the adjacent one. Everything in order. Everything in its place. Except for him. Annoyingly.

If he was clean, maybe he’d feel more like himself. Whether that would be an improvement was debatable, but a version less strange was the least he hoped for. In the shower, he took stock of the evening, turned over details, which, as a detective, he gathered habitually. That Barlow was right-handed but cross-dominant. The dull glint off his earring when he rubbed the back of his head. The hint of burgundy on his wet lower lip between sips of wine. The way his jumper clung softly to the curves of his chest and his belly.

He closed his eyes and touched his own chest, testing himself for a response, although his touch rarely yielded much of one. This time it was Barlow’s hand on him, or the body he touched belonged to Barlow. Unmistakably his was the agitated beating inside of it. The pull of want seldom visited, and now it knocked at his ribcage. To be let out or allowed in, Chandler could never tell which since its persistence never outlasted his.

He wiped a clear stripe across the bathroom mirror. However poorly his own self fit, he was indeed the same person.

He made his nightly circuit around his flat, ensuring that all things that should be off were in fact off before heading to bed. He sank into it, and the heavy weight of exhaustion from socializing pushed him down deeper into it. His eyelids slid over the dim image of Barlow and, in his dreams, opened to a different, stunningly vivid one.

It was dusk on the other side of the window. Inside their skin was golden with candlelight. His hair, the color of embers, framed a strong, thick neck which sat on corded shoulders. They flowed out into arms flanking a torso that was sculpted from ivory but pulsated with breath. Chandler’s shirt, a holy white, rucked up to his chin, swaddled an upturned face of ecstasy. Like Caravaggio’s Mary Magdalene. Like Blessed Ludovica Albertoni. Like…nothing he’d ever felt before.

A hand, large and rough but slim-fingered, lay flat on his side. It burned like a branding iron, but Chandler, craving its heat, curved into it with a shuddering gasp. The other hand ran up the underside of his stockinged calf then over his bare knee and along his bare thigh. Along and along until…

_I — oh god, I love you. My Ja—_

“ —ames.”

Chandler sprang up to the sound of his own voice as if it had come from an intruder. He could smell the sweat that had collected in the creases of his skin and the sweat that saturated his sheets, already gone cold and musky. Twisted around him, he fell out of the bed in a panic, trying to escape the sickly damp of them. He staggered towards the bathroom, disoriented and crashing into doorjambs, his erection bouncing obscenely ahead of him. He whacked the shower knob on and stepped in without hesitation beneath the cascade of frigid water. He bellowed in surprise, but still he remained hard, still the touch of his dream remained on his skin and rushed hot through his veins.

He leaned forward until his forehead met cold tile. He reached behind himself as he wrapped his other hand around his cock. He shut his eyes as he slid a finger down between his buttocks. He could feel him — _inside of him_ — as he felt himself there. The phantom body warmed him against the cold by moving over his in a wet slide, with the press of his flesh and ragged breaths on his skin, by stroking his cock. That hand worked over the head not in the economical manner Chandler would have done this but slowly, to draw his pleasure out. As if the dream knew better than he did of the best ways to tease and delight him and drive him to the edge of breathless collapse.

He fell back against the other wall, panting and now shivering. He blindly turned the knob in the other direction and waited until the water scalded and his fingers ran clean.

He threw on his bathrobe and eased himself down onto the sofa. He mindlessly scratched his foot. Twice-showered but his head was none clearer. He let it fall backwards and concentrated on the hum of the refrigerator. In this addled state, the thing that so upset him seemed like the sole thing that could possibly comfort him now. Wrap his arms around him and, in the quiet and the dark, hold him until he was himself again.

He shifted in his seat to face the bank of large windows. The scattered lights of the city made him wonder about those were also awake now and why. Was he?

Hair dripping into his eyes, he wiped his brow with his sleeve. It was nothing more than a dream. This feeling would pass. He stripped the bed and bagged the sheets.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Chandler’s phone buzzed.

He had just fallen asleep.

He lifted it to his eyes.

Miles.

It was Saturday morning. This was not a good sign.

Chandler stormed into the incident room which was empty but Miles hunched over his desk. He met Chandler’s eyes and threw his hands up in disbelief.

“What? Happened?”

“They let him go. Insufficient evidence placing him on the scene at the time of death.”

Chandler exhaled then said more calmly, “Get your coat on.”

Outside of Haverhill House, children of all ages played outside including the girl, who’d received them so warmly before, her bright pink headscarf unmistakable. To her, they were unmistakable as well.

She circled them tauntingly on her bicycle. On the last turn, she blew them a raspberry before riding off.

“Yeah, morning to you too,” Miles groused.

The news vans had cleared off. Muriel and Abigail had already fallen below the fold. The press had moved onto to yet another politician’s questionable dealings with Alexei Milyutin, a Russian oligarch whose craggy, scowling face covered the front pages today. Resources were already being allocated elsewhere, and less uniforms paced the landings. Miles and Chandler flashed their warrant cards to two of the few who remained and kept watch outside of Muriel’s flat.

Miles snapped on some gloves and headed towards the bedroom, leaving the sitting room to Chandler. The stark light filtered by the thin curtains turned the flat more dismal than it already was. Chandler’s eyes flitted over the misshapen sofa cushions. The months-old fashion magazines. The one framed photo — of her mother, dead. The short stack of DVD’s, the kind you’d find on sale in a wire basket. If poetry had taught Chandler anything it was that much of the world around you could be made beautiful by simply looking. So he looked. And looked. For not just evidence but also for a sign that there had been beauty in her life. Something — or someone maybe — that kept her going through the long, dull days. Something had to have for her to get clean and stay so. But Chandler only saw a place where life didn’t so much as go on but away.

It wasn’t part of the job to spin her brief existence into one less sad than it was. He was reminded of his mother’s desperation to get closure over his father’s death, her anger at how he’d circumvented the universe’s intended ending for their story, her refusal to believe that after death there was nothing. Just — _nothing_. None of the mediums, santeros, or paranormal experts fooled Chandler nor her to an extent that that wasn’t true, that there was in fact _something_ after death. Still, she let them fleece her for all that she had. In the end, she resorted to what was free: prayer. With her two hands clasped, she finally strangled off what kept her tied to this world. Her husband had imparted death to her, the way they together imparted life to him — and then Chandler was alone. Closure couldn’t bring back someone from the dead anyway.

He recounted Muriel’s day as he’d done countless times already. He pictured her entering the flat in her work pinny with her name tag on it. Setting her keys and her bag down on the sofa. Then, tired, sitting down next to it.

She probably proceeded to do what most people did: check her phone. She had received a call from Corbin the week before, but nothing about it placed him in her flat on Tuesday.

Miles rejoined him. He put his hands on his hips.

“Like before. Nothing that the SOCO’s wouldn’t have picked up already.”

“The bathroom.”

Since Chandler wasn’t about to delve into the crevices of that particular room, Miles begrudgingly lowered himself in front of the vanity. He opened it and peered inside.

“Christ, smells like balls,” he muttered.

“Is there a leak?”

“No. Dry.”

He pushed some things to the side to reveal some rot on the wall.

“What are we looking for?”

“Red paint?”

Miles shifted a toilet roll. Against the white paper was a red paint fleck. He clicked on his torch and flashed it towards the back where the pipe went into the wall.

“Might be something.”

“We’ll get some SOCO’s back in here. Hopefully they’ll lift a print off the pipe or something.”

“That still doesn’t place him here at the time of death.”

“I know,” Chandler huffed.

He helped Miles to his feet. They returned to the sitting room where Chandler gazed out of the window to mull. He could see the girl from earlier walking her bike towards the building’s entrance.

“Let’s see if the downstairs neighbors are in.”

A man, presumably the girl’s father, cheerfully welcomed them inside.

“That poor woman,” he lamented. “Not in my forty years living here has anything like this happened. I mean, stuff happens, but stuff happens everywhere. I know what people think about this place — and us, but we’re not all like that.”

“Yes, of course. We have — “

Just then the girl entered. She rolled her eyes.

“Gross.”

“Maira, stop it.”

She flopped onto the sofa and crossed her arms. She stared at Chandler and Miles with open contempt.

“On four occasions, you called Matthew Corbin to complain about — “

The man groaned at the name. “A leak. In our bathroom ceiling. We’d talked to Ms. Tanning about it, and she said she’d been complaining about it too.”

“May we?”

The three of them squeezed into the bathroom. The leak had been bad enough for a chunk of drywall to have fallen away.

“Three weeks! Drip, drip, drip, all day. It was driving us mental.”

“It’s not dripping now,” Miles said. “When did it stop?”

The man shouted over his shoulder, “Maira, when did the leak stop?”

“Tuesday.”

Miles and Chandler glanced at each other.

They gathered around Maira who’d moved on from radiating like a nuclear reactor core of resentment to playing video games.

“Were you home when it stopped?” Chandler asked.

“Yeah. I’d just come back from school.”

“Do you remember at what time?”

“A bit before three. It was dripping of course, and then it stopped. I was so fucking — “

Her dad shot her a disapproving look.

“ _Pleased_. I rang my dad. Left him a message about it.”

“Oh, that’s right.” The father grabbed his phone from his back trouser pocket and put the voicemail on speakerphone. The message began with a high-pitched squeal. Maira shrank behind her handheld console, embarrassed.

“ _Dad! The leak stopped. It stopped. The wanker finally fixed the leak!_ ”

The timestamp was 14.54.

“Thank you. Both of you for your assistance.”

“Of course.”

“Byyyyye,” Maira sang without looking up.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Mansell knocked on Chandler’s open door.

“Right, thank you, Riley.” He put his phone down. “Yes, Mansell?”

“That LLC Corbin transferred money from.”

“You found out who registered it?”

“Get this, another LLC, a nominee company called Zola Enterprises. Can they do that?”

“If you have expensive lawyers.”

“Well, that’s some box in an office building in Bermuda. This one’s too but here.”

He handed Chandler the address of the P.O. box’s location.

“Chiswick. That is a lot closer than Bermuda.”

“If you need someone to go to Bermuda for some, you know, on-the-ground investigative work, I’m game.”

“How about an afternoon in Chiswick instead?” Chandler smirked at him. “Find out who the owner of this company is and get a hold of them for an interview. I’ll deal with this.”

“Sure?”

“Yes. I haven’t left this place all day.”

“I ask, ‘cause you look like — ”

Chandler’s glare dared him to finish that sentence.

“Yeah, why don’t I check this out?”

“Thank you.”

In his car, Chandler took a sip of green tea from his thermos. He caught his reflection in the rearview mirror. His eyes might have been a tad sunken, and his skin less rosy than it normally was. So maybe, yes, he did look as Mansell wouldn’t say.

The address took him to a concrete and asphalt retail strip in a residential area. He entered the shopfront advertising shipping services. Boxes of all sizes and shapes, irregularly taped and crookedly labeled threatened to teeter when the door shut behind him. Plastic totes crowding his path overflowed with letters, their angled corners jutting like fins. Chandler sucked in a breath. He rearranged them in his head in order to maximize space and minimize fire hazards while the manager photocopied the rental agreement for Building the Future’s P.O. box.

Chandler skimmed at the document in his hand.

William Rett. The name was familiar. Something thankfully clicked, and he remembered.

He turned back around and showed the manager a picture of Ash’s lawyer on his phone.

“This man?”

“Oh, yeah, can’t forget that hair. Closed his account not that long ago actually.”

Chandler pointed to Peter Ash seated next to him.

“What about this man?”

He shrugged. “Him? Ahhhh, couldn’t tell you. Looks like any white middle-aged bloke to be honest. Sorry.”

“Quite all right. Thank you for your help.” He handed the manager a card. “If you should see either of them, please call this number.”

Chandler leaned against his car, yawning and rubbing his temples. The answers were too out-of-focus to draw a tidy box around them, and the strain of trying to make them out was starting to feel like tin foil crunching in his brain pan.

He wrote the names Zola Enterprises and Building the Future on the whiteboard then tacked up a headshot William Rett from his law firm’s website underneath. He stepped back, hoping that, with these additional pieces placed in some sort of context, they would altogether form an actual picture. He scrubbed a hand over his face and sighed. That would be a declarative “no.” With every call to Zola Enterprises ending with the frustrating beep of an automated message, there was no point in hanging about just to twiddle their thumbs. Chandler called it a day and sent everyone home, including himself.

Back in his flat, Chandler retrieved the slim box from his coat pocket and tossed it onto the hallway table. He seized up at the faint rattle of the pills inside their blisters. The list of medications he used to administer to his mother suddenly unspooled in his head. Antidepressants, mood stabilizers, appetite stimulants… He could hear them when he laid them out in perfectly spaced rows on the kitchen counter — _clack_ , _clack_ , _clack_. When he counted them and grouped them into weekly organizers, then shook them out each day to hand to her. He could still see the long names and the abbreviated instructions on the labels, the shapes and the colors. He could feel the chalky residue on his fingers that they left behind and that smell — the memory of which tightened his throat with nausea.

He assured himself that these pills were a last resort. It’s not like he didn’t keep a bottle of vodka in the back of his freezer for a similar reason.

When it was finally a reasonable hour to go to bed, he took one pill as directed. He retreated to his bedroom and closed the black-out curtains. The room instantly became smaller, and it shrank further as he shrank within himself into an even darker space.

A line of light pierced the gap in his curtains and bisected his bed. How was it already morning? After Chandler rubbed his eyes clear, he saw that he was no longer in bed. Upright and dressed for work, he wasn’t in his flat. He was in Muriel’s, facing the window. The sky was overcast, a thick muddled white, a funereal sky. What light did enter the room dyed it an iron grey. Behind him, Muriel yawned silently. She watched the light streaming through her curtains along with him. Blankly, like his mother did when she couldn’t do much but stare and not see. 

He walked out of the flat in search of Miles and found himself in a garishly lit corridor. Above the auditory collage of medical equipment and ringing phones, he heard voices and the stray squeak of rubber clogs on linoleum, but every which way he turned, he didn’t see a single person. He passed through a pair of swinging doors and then another. With every threshold he crossed, the lights grew dimmer and dimmer and the corridor darker and darker. His shoes went from clapping linoleum to clapping stone. The clapping stopped when the stone met his bare soles. Cold pierced them and threaded up his legs. The wool that covered his limbs was worn and fraying and did little to counteract it. Water dripped around him at a steady clip. He could hear a howling laugh and now just a howl and the jangling of chains.

He looked ahead down a seemingly interminable gallery. Logic suggested that if he kept walking, he’d to come to an end and perhaps an exit. So he kept walking then ran.

“Hello?”

 _Finally!_ Another person! His voice was distant though, split into two echoes originating from two different points in space.

“Hello?” There it was again but merged into one query. Chandler stopped running and walked more calmly in the direction of it.

The voice became louder and clearer until —

“Joe?”

The blunt of his name tore a small hole in the scrim over his eyes. Through it he could see his phone cradled in his hand. He brought it warily to his ear.

“Who is this?”

“It’s James. You called me.”

“ _What?_ ” He glanced at the time on his phone. It was nearly three. “Oh — oh god, I didn’t mean to.”

“I’d ask if you’re all right, but I think I know the answer.”

“ _Shit_ ,” he swore under his breath. “I’m so sorry for waking you.”

“No worries. I wasn’t asleep anyway. I got sucked into a research rabbit hole so I wasn’t even aware of how late it was. So. What’s on your mind, Detective Inspector?”

“This is absolutely mortifying, but I was having a nightmare.”

“Ah. What about? If you feel like telling me.”

“What are they ever?”

“Stress?”

“Stress,” Chandler concurred. “I dreamt I was in the facility my mother occasionally spent time in. A psychiatric hospital to be more specific. And then I was…well, somewhere else. Somewhere old, very old. It was damp and dark and had stone floors and chains for some reason and… The last thing anyone wants to listen to is someone trying to describe his dream to them.”

“That’s all right. I’m sorry to hear you had such an upsetting dream. Since you’ve got me on the line, might a bedtime story help?”

Chandler chuckled softly. “I really shouldn’t bother you any further.”

“You’re sure? It’s a love story.”

“It would need to be a short one.”

“I’m afraid it’s anything but. Ten years or so in the making. Extending across centuries.”

“So it’s a story about love’s gross inefficiency.”

Barlow laughed then muttered to himself, “Something short, something short.”

Chandler could hear the shuffling of pages. A breath taken.

“‘Be like a rocky promontory against which the restless surf continuously pounds; it stands fast while the churning sea is lulled to sleep at its feet. I hear you say, _How unlucky that this should happen to me_. Not at all. Say instead — “

“’How lucky I am that I am not broken by what has happened and am not afraid of what is about to happen.’”

The words fell out his mouth before Chandler registered that they were coming from him. He heard the soft thud of a book falling shut.

“You said you hadn’t read it.”

“I must have seen or heard it quoted somewhere. Or maybe I did read it for school and forgot. One’s memory can be full of surprises.”

“Nice ones too.”

“One would hope.”

“I do. Now try to get some sleep.”

“I will.”

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

“What would you call that hairstyle anyway? Little Lord Fauntleroy?” Miles asked as they approached the interview room.

“He’s usually depicted with a fringe,” Chandler said dully as he rubbed Tiger Balm onto his temples.

“All right? If you need to — you know, have a wobble in the toilets or something, we can have him wait all day if we want.”

“I’m fine. Let’s just get on with this.”

Chandler opened the door.

Rett sat back in the chair when Chandler sat forward in his. He pulled the copy of the mailbox rental agreement and turned it around for Rett to see. He didn’t look at it, preferring to keep his gaze fixed on Chandler.

“Are you the Executive Director of the company Zola Enterprises?”

“Yes.”

“This is the same Zola Enterprises under which this P.O. box for Building the Future was rented?”

Rett studied the rental agreement with performed curiosity. “Hm. Appears so.”

“What is the purpose of this company?”

“I have many high-profile clients who like to keep their property purchases anonymous. Nothing unusual.”

“Money laundering,” Miles said matter-of-factly.

Rett laughed. “Security reasons. Anti-rich sentiment has become so awfully trendy.”

“There are no records of any purchases made by Building the Future, but it received five remittances totaling 100,000 from three different company cards held by Zola Enterprises.”

“You need financing to start a new company.”

“But you closed the account after only a few months. And quite recently.”

“A business decision made by my client who’s reassessing the venture.”

“And who is this client?”

“That information is privileged I’m afraid.”

Miles snorted. “Let me get this straight. Building the Future existed solely to invest in the business of paying Matthew Corbin?”

“Matthew…? To pay for what exactly? I’m not apprised of all the dealings of my clients. Which is the point.”

“To murder someone.”

“Murder?”

Rett looked down. Turning from haughty self-confidence, his face sagged suddenly, almost theatrically.

“Are you — are you going to cry?”

Rett sighed loudly. “It was ransom money.”

Chandler and Miles sat up straighter and said simultaneously, “What?”

He leaned in conspiratorially. “He claimed to have Ash’s daughter. Demanded a hundred-thousand. Although it appears we may have been duped.”

Chandler furrowed his brow. “Why didn’t you pay in cash?”

Rett glanced over at Miles before raising his eyebrows at Chandler in silent communication.

“Really?” Miles laughed sarcastically.

He angled himself closer to Chandler and whispered, “He hasn’t got it.”

“Please repeat that.”

Rett exhaled irritably through his nose and flicked his hair back. “He — he hasn’t got it.”

“What? His houses, his cars? You’re telling us he’s skint?” Miles scoffed.

“None of that is liquid. You — “ He looked pointedly at Chandler again. “ — know how it is.”

“Why don’t you explain how it is exactly? For my partner’s edification.”

“There are expectations people of a certain economic class have of each other. Lavish parties for every occasion, expensive clothes, generous charity donations. If Mr. Ash liquidated any of his assets, people would notice. People would…talk.”

“All my sympathies. Truly,” Miles sneered.

“Well, you wouldn’t understand, would you?”

“How am I supposed to understand something that makes no sense — “

“Detective Sergeant,” Chandler interrupted. “May I have a word with you outside?”

Out in the corridor, Chandler and Miles gaped at each other incredulously.

“What the fuck? Ransom money?”

“If she was last seen in Whitechapel, it isn’t impossible.”

“Well, Jesus, nothing’s impossible. I guess you ought to give the Home Office a ring. In case they have something that’d rule Corbin out.”

“Before I do, let’s have another go at Corbin and see how he reacts to this development.”

Miles arched an eyebrow. “Intuition?”

“I haven’t a bloody clue.”

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

“What? Fu— fucking what?” Corbin stammered. He looked helplessly at his provided counsel then at Chandler again. “He said I — I — _what?_ ”

Chandler showed him the photo of Abigail.

“I seen her on telly. And I swear to God that’s the only place I seen her.”

“What do you know about Building the Future?”

Corbin ran a hand through his hair. He stared hard at the table. His knee bounced vigorously.

“Well, come on!” Miles shouted.

“I get an email, right? That this company’s been registered, and I was the sole shareholder or something of it. ‘Course I thought it was spam like anybody would’ve so I trashed it. But then I get another saying its bank account had some eighteen-thousand quid put in it, and here’s how I can get it. So, for a laugh, I called the bank, and they were, like, yeah, mate, that’s yours.”

“You took the money, and then what?”

“I get a call, unlisted number. Some bloke with an accent — “

“What kind of accent?” Chandler asked.

“I don’t know. Like fucking Dracula? Man, I don’t know.”

“Eastern European?”

“Yeah, I guess. Fuck, I don’t — I don’t know. But this guy asks if I want to make more money. So now I’m getting proper paranoid and shit, thinking I took some, like, mafia money, you know? And I’m going to get whacked unless I did what I was told.”

“Kill Muriel Tanning?”

“Jesus — let me tell it, will you? So he instructs me to go to an empty house nearby. On that block that got all bought up. I go, and there’s a burner on the middle of the floor in the lounge. It starts ringing so I guess they were watching me. Same bloke tells me they want bad stuff to happen at Haverhill. And I’m, like, what, it’s not fucking Greendale over there, what kind of bad stuff?”

“And?”

“And what? They wanted, like, _really_ bad stuff, all right?”

“That simple, huh?”

Corbin dropped his head into his hands. 

“That simple,” Miles sighed. “Jesus Christ, what did you expect?”

“What you mean?”

Chandler’s expression hardened. “You’re a familiar face. No one would suspect you entering and leaving the flats, right? But also because you’re a — “

“Chav,” Miles helpfully offered.

“A — chav.” Chandler hated calling anyone that as much as Corbin must have hated being called that by Chandler. “Who would take your word against theirs? They only needed to wave some money at you, and you’d do their bidding. A hundred-thousand? That’s a pittance to them. That’s money they can throw away like they throw away people. People like your tenants. People like you. You’re going to prison and lose what little you had and would ever hope to gain in your miserable, pathetic life. Including that ugly watch. And what do you think will happen to them?”

“You think they’re gonna shed tears in their champagne for you? They won’t send you a proper lawyer anymore — no offense, Barry.”

“None taken.”

“Why did they want Muriel dead?” Chandler asked.

“They didn’t. They wanted anybody. They didn’t care who. Muriel, she used to hit me up when I was still slinging until she got clean. I figured…”

“You figured it wouldn’t be so bad offing Muriel, because who would care if she was dead? You didn’t even intend to hit her, did you? You were hoping she’d simply OD.”

“She asked for more than I knew she could handle after being clean for as long as that. Must have had a real shit day, you know? Then she had to change her mind, tried to give it back.” He shook his head. “Stupid.”

“But why? What’s the point?” Miles interjected.

“The point? You’ve seen what the neighborhood’s been looking like. Places like Haverhill House aren’t long for most of London. Bad news speeds things up, eh?”

“They paid you to kill — “ Corbin flinched at the word. “ — someone for bad PR?”

“Huh?”

“Nevermind.”

“Detective Sergeant, I think we’re done here for now.” Chandler tucked the photo of Abigail back into the folder.

“They’re lying. They’re fucking lying, man. I didn’t try to take no girl.”

“Riiiight,” Miles muttered over him as he headed for the door.

“Oh, come on!”

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

This case with its single-digit body count couldn’t have differed more from the fantastically baroque ones that had made their department’s name. So it seemed appropriate that the trial, a perfunctory affair, should end on a muted note. Upon sentencing, no wails of agony or indignant protests erupted from the gallery. No tears were shed, not even by Corbin. With the Ash camp uninterested in pursuing charges of extortion, he might have a chance for early release, but his future in or out of prison wasn’t promising either way.

As much as Commander Anderson could be concerned, a job was well done if it was done. 

“Now move on,” he directed Chandler as he passed him on his way out of the courtroom. High praise indeed.

But it wasn’t done. The next day, back in his office, Chandler wrote out hypothetical scenario after hypothetical scenario that connected Ash to the murder. He couldn’t get near him or the Abigail search, so all he had was what he tolerated the least — pure speculation, nothing whiteboard-worthy. He sighed heavily and sat back, massaging his temples and wracking his brain for what he might be missing. _What else_ , _what else_ , _what else?_ Flustered, he rapped the lid of his Tiger Balm with his fingertip.

Before heading home, Miles made his customary stop at Chandler’s door. Chandler offered him the faintest hum of recognition as he studied his notes spread out on his desk.

“Go home, Joe. Get some sleep. You look like warmed-over shit. For you anyway.”

“Everyone insists on telling me.” He hadn’t a strand out of place, but he smoothed his hair back anyway.

“Why don’t you come over ours? We can have a beer and feed the fish like real men. Judy’s been asking about you. One of her cousins is in from up north.”

“Not another cousin, Miles.”

“Big family. Can’t help it. Unless…” Miles drew out the word into a question.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that.” Chandler ducked his head down. A dangling participle suddenly required urgent revision.

“You can tell me.”

As he reread the sentence in his head, Chandler muttered distractedly, “Possibly. I don’t know.”

Miles’s eyebrows shot up his forehead, but when his brain did what it did, the eyebrows quickly returned to place. “That — baldy, beardy bloke? I was joking about him.”

“I am not having this conversation with you.” Chandler shuffled the papers into a pile until every edge lined up perfectly.

“You said you weren’t gay.”

“Yes, but I didn’t say I was straight either, now did I?”

“Well, what’s the diff— you know what?” Miles raised his hands in surrender. “You’re a grown man.”

“I’ve heard the rumor.”

“Capable of making his own decisions about his love life.”

“I’m inclined to agree.”

“So good luck with all of that.”

“Your support has been duly noted. In fact, we’ll be attending a lecture on Raymond Roussel on Monday if you care to join us.”

“I think I’d rather set my pubic hair on fire — “

“I was being polite.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Just as he was about to depart, Miles turned on his heel and poked his head back in. “If it turns out he thinks he’s possessed by the ghost of Jack bloody Keats — ”

“Go home, Ray.”

Chandler listened to Miles’s footfalls fade completely before deflating gracelessly in his chair. It was an admission he hadn’t even made to himself, and now there it was — out in the open, making rude gestures at him.

Joseph H. Chandler fancied someone.

For the past few days, he had been thoroughly preoccupied with paperwork that what he thought was his growing affection for that “baldy, beardy bloke” had been a passing whim, and he was in actuality glad to have one less thing taking up space in his crowded mind. But Miles had to bring into relief all those squirming, squishy, uncomfortably moist feelings.

The dreams lately had been mostly forgettable too. Sure, a few were pleasant enough for him to curl into the sleep-softened sheets around a body that wasn’t there. And, sure, when he’d awoken to no one, he had felt a heavy sadness. He supposed there was no such thing as a good dream if it had an end, so who could blame him for momentarily wanting to recreate in real life the false sense of joy that clung to his bones afterwards? The others, the dreams he could call bad, echoed horrors of no discernible form but left him as shaken as if they had and so quietly, so acutely alone.

He could blame the lack of sleep, the dreams when he did sleep, the pills he needed to sleep, but whatever he could blame for the state he’d been in, he was certain that he only had himself to find a remedy.

He turned on his phone.

There were the usual texts, nothing urgent. The least urgent of all was a string from Barlow, but he read those first.

_\- Hey._

_\- Haven’t heard from you in a bit. Assuming you’re busy. Hope all is well._

_\- If you’re up for it. Maybe we can get together soon._

If he was up for it… Chandler had to laugh.

_\- That would be nice, he wrote back. Dinner? Tonight?_

He placed the phone facedown and reached for the Tiger Balm. Yes, Joseph H. Chandler fancied someone.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

“This is the time for tying up loose ends. To organize. Reflect. Not to play games on your phone and gossip about celebrities.”

Inertia, Chandler wagged a marker for emphasis, was the bane of detective work. His team save for Kent looked at their feet, having heard many versions of this lecture before. After they mumbled their assents, Chandler returned to his office, mindful of the fact that he was also trying to bolster himself. All morning — as he dressed, as he drove, as he waited for the kettle — he found his thoughts getting sucked again and again into the undertow of his memories of the previous night. Of him. His knife-sharp intelligence. The contagious resoluteness of his convictions. His…cheekbones.

Chandler shook his head. Work to do. There was always work to do. Between calls to CPS, Chandler researched every property purchased through Zola Enterprises. Three row houses in Chelsea, a mansion in Primrose Hill, a pied-à-terre in Kensington, another in the City, and so on. All with seven-figure price tags, a few approaching eight, all in the expected postcodes, bought anonymously, in haste and over-ask. Together they formed one of the hallmarks of money laundering but technically not illegal on its face. Besides that, decades-old, they were evidence of nothing apart from the obscenity of concentrated wealth.

Chandler restlessly tapped the space bar of his keyboard with his fingernail. The staccato clicking helped unearth the memory of Barlow then Corbin’s mentions of the nearby block of maisonettes. The general condition of them were varying levels of shabby. The interiors he had seen were in his opinion in need of complete rehab. Most likely purchased as investment properties, someone had to be banking on a future payday that gentrification would be doling out.

As he began his search into them, Chandler’s phone buzzed.

“Busy?” Anderson asked without ceremony.

“I’ve nothing pressing at the moment. Why?”

“Meet me at the club in an hour.”

“For what?”

“Meet me at the club in an hour.”

“All right, I’ll be there.”

When he arrived, a glass of mineral water with a lemon wedge was waiting for him. Chandler sat down in the Chesterfield armchair across from Anderson.

“Christ, Joe, you look awful.”

“I’ve been told.”

“I’m not going to beat around the bush. Some of your recent requests for warrants have been brought to my attention.”

“They weren’t granted, so what needs to be discussed?”

“I’ve been told they were in regard to the Tanning case?”

“Corbin said he was paid to murder Muriel Tanning. I am simply doing my duty in trying to prove or disprove this.”

“I was told that he was paid to return Abigail Ash to her father.”

“Corbin denies that. And there’s no evidence supporting the story that Corbin was extorting Ash.”

“What motivation would Ash have to pay Corbin to murder this woman?”

“That’s what we need to figure out.”

“Joe, you’ve got the murderer, and he will most likely spend the rest of his life in prison. Justice has been done for that poor girl. And now you’re pissing away time and energy on baseless speculation. Running around Chiswick — ”

“How did you know I was in Chiswick — “

“Did I not tell you to move on, Joe?”

“There was no reason for Corbin to murder Muriel Tanning otherwise.”

“Corbin’s a jumped-up, drug-dealing thug. She obviously didn’t have the money to pay him, and things got heated. It’s a sad story but not an unusual one.”

“And that’s a good enough story for you, is it?”

“This isn’t about what’s good enough for me.” 

“No, no, it isn’t. But I have a good idea for whom it is.”

As usual Anderson’s face betrayed no emotion so what followed came at Chandler like a sucker punch. “I asked you here, because I wanted to inform you personally that you are being put on leave. Long-term sick leave until further notice. Effective immediately.”

“What?”

“It’ll draw less scrutiny than a suspension, don’t you agree?”

“A suspension? On what grounds, could you suspend me? I… Are you seriously threatening my job over this?”

“They all know about your parents and your disorder. Add to that the failure to capture the Ripper, to bring the Krays to trial, that woman’s death in your custody. The fact that any one of them has more than enough friends here in this very room to have you drummed out and humiliated in the press. You’d be ruined. A few have even entertained the outrageous idea of having you sectioned for god’s sake.”

Chandler’s stomach dropped at those last words. He raised the glass to his lips but set it down before taking a drink, unsure if he’d be able to swallow.

“They very much mean to see you swing in the wind if you continue to pursue this line of inquiry, and there will be nothing I can do this time to protect you. Consider this, Joe, as an opportunity to have a nice, long, well-deserved holiday and assess whether or not this is worth your career. Or be dragged before the review board. If you’d rather take your chances with them, it’s a guarantee that you will never work for the Met again.”

Chandler glanced around the room. Unconsciously perhaps for an ally. Cigar smoke wreathed the thinning-haired heads of men who were being waited on by prim servers. He recognized many of them. A few accidentally made eye contact they quickly broke off. They had all known his father so they knew him too, and Chandler didn’t care to dwell on what they thought about him.

He stormed to his car. He so wanted to, but he couldn’t punch his frustration out like he used to when he was young. Not in the middle of a parking garage anyway. Instead he flung himself into his car and slammed the door shut as hard as he could. Sitting in this capsule of dense silence, his — everything — was so gratingly loud. He jabbed the ignition button, missing it at first, then again as he choked back the urge to scream at universe. The hum of the engine and the burbling chatter of Radio 4 filled the car. They were wet churning noise beneath Anderson’s words.

“Fuck.”

His swearing lapsed into resigned laughter. He rested his forehead against the steering wheel.

_…have a nice, long, well-deserved holiday…_

How did one even do that?

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

The worst was not knowing — when he could return to work if he’d still have a job and what this potentially bode for his team. It wasn’t exactly difficult for anyone to read between the lines. Miles as a courtesy checked in with him every day while also answering directly to the DCI. He knew to skip the small talk, to not ask after Chandler’s wellbeing, and to report to him as he would have under normal circumstances. Obviously current circumstances weren't normal, and without the general buzz of something always happening, the constant exchanging of ideas, even the smell of stale coffee, this was a pretty lifeless exercise in formality.

In a rare moment of self-pity, Chandler moaned loudly and unhappily. _The whiteboards!_

He took a deep breath and a gulp of green tea to brace himself for yet another day of not knowing. He opened his moleskine to the page on which he had listed every extracurricular activity that he had at one point in his life considered appealing enough to take up. Learn to bake, speak Urdu, play the ukulele. Train for a marathon, get a pet fish, grow windowsill herbs. Mansell of all people suggested knitting for its calming repetition and symmetry — and surely knitting suited an old spinster like Chandler.

He read numerous fish care primers while fiddling with his newly purchased needles. He repeatedly introduced himself in Urdu as he bookmarked overly complicated cake recipes. He watched tutorials on how to tune your ukulele while organizing seed packets.

It had been a week. A single, solitary week. He hurled a ball of yarn at the wall, which he then guiltily chased after and scooped up from the floor.

His phone dinged. He lunged at it, praying that his life’s purpose needed him at the station immediately.

_\- Free today?_

It was Barlow.

_Oh god, yes._

He supposed he would do.

_\- Yes, I am._

_\- Finsbury Circus Gardens? At 11? Lovely day out. Then lunch?_

Chandler opened the curtains to confirm that it was in fact a lovely day. An especially rare one too: sunny and without the threat of rain.

He arrived early enough to buy another tea and to hopefully enjoy the outdoors by himself for a few minutes. Or so he thought he had. Barlow was already there, seated on a bench by the gazebo, his penchant for punctuality a match of his.

Upon seeing him, he rose and gave Chandler a half-hug. Unsure of how to reciprocate, Chandler nearly dropped his tea down Barlow’s back.

“Can you imagine I’d almost forgotten how shit the weather always is here?”

“Thank you for luring me out. I was unexpectedly gifted some free time, and frankly I’m not sure what to do with it. So far I’ve spent it cloistered in my flat cleaning.”

“Oh? What happened?”

“Where to begin?”

“Work, is it?”

“When is it not? Now, I suppose.”

“Were you fired?”

“No. Not yet. I’ve been put on leave as a not particularly subtle warning. Some people didn’t like where I had been sticking my nose.”

“What a surprise. Self-serving bastards, the lot of them. Imagine if the law was applied to the powerful in the same measure it is to the powerless.” Barlow caught himself and chuckled. “Sorry. Not the appropriate time for that.”

Chandler shrugged as he peeled off a glove. He pushed his coat sleeve up and scratched his arm through his jumper.

“It’s quite all right. Please don’t think that you have to mind your words around me.”

“Let me say then, Joe, that you’re a decent guy. I can tell you don’t know how to be anything else, and you don’t deserve to be treated like this.”

“I’d argue that, but we can save that for another day. I’ll be fine. I always somehow am.” At the moment though, he was actually a bit queasy. He peered into the sip hole of the cup’s lid and wondered if his tea was to blame. It did appear darker and murkier than it should. “You must know that Keats was born right over there. Is that why you asked me here?”

“Sort of.”

“Are we to make a habit of communing with the dead?”

“Since Keats died in Rome, maybe to commune with the past instead. It was the dream you told me about. Remember? It reminded me of a place that’s come up in my research: the old Bethlem Royal Hospital which used to be near here. It stood partly where Liverpool Street Station is then moved just west of the park. It’s somewhere in Kent now, I think.”

“Oh?” Chandler glanced down. He pushed the sleeve of his jumper up to get at this persistent itch and flinched at the sight of a mark on his skin that wasn’t there before. “When?”

“Late 17th century-ish.”

“Bethlem…as in bedlam.”

“Yes.”

“We should have asked Ed to join us and give us a proper tour. He’s mentioned it during the course of past investigations and the kinds of things they did to patients there. What a grisly business medical care was back then.”

“‘Care’ is putting it generously. It was more of a prison for those deemed unfit for society.”

“They were tortured.”

“Treated, they would have said.”

Chandler pinched the bridge of his nose. He could feel the cold, wet stone beneath his bare feet again. His stomach lurched at the tinny smell of it.

“Joe, are you all right?”

Chandler set his cup down but on the curved edge of the bench. Hot tea splashed his fingers as he tried to catch it mid-fall. He shook the liquid off, but it was already burning through his skin and eating its way up his arm.

“I am. I was. I — ” He frantically took a handkerchief out and wiped his fingers. He could see skin fall away in ragged strips as he did. “My fingers.”

“Your fingers are fine. Joe?”

He shut his eyes. With gritted teeth, he forced himself to look again. They were fine if a little pink. He took a deep breath. No longer burning, his skin started to crawl. And itch. _How it itched._ He grasped his arm at the crook of his elbow. He could feel something thin and sharp going across it and see his arms beneath his sleeves running with blood. He squeezed his eyes shut again. He was fine. He was fine. He was sitting in a park with Barlow. It was in fact a beautiful, crisp winter day, which he was enjoying, thank you very much.

“What time is it?”

“Ten after.”

“No, I meant the date — the date.”

“I should take you — ”

“No hospitals. _No._ ”

“I was going to say home.”

Chandler could only nod, afraid if he spoke again, the gray water rising around him would fill his lungs. Barlow began to shift in and out of his focus, overlapping with another version of him like radio signals at the limit of one transmission’s reach. When this other man came into view, Chandler saw him on the gallows awaiting the noose. He saw him getting shot. Getting slashed. Drowning. Chandler tried to reach into the muddle of his thoughts to find the plug, a switch, anything. What was it that he’d forgotten to do that could have prevented his death? That thing he should have done that he didn’t do, that he’d simply, stupidly overlooked. And now this man was dead. All those people were dead, his parents, _dead_ , because of him and his carelessness.

Chandler fished his keys out of his inner coat pocket with a shaking hand. They sounded like chains rattling.

“My stove.”

“Your stove?“

“Nothing. I’m fine. I — I am. Do you think you could drive me home though?”

Barlow took his keys. After a few failed recitations of his address and attempts to find his car, they were finally on their way to Fitzrovia.

Once inside of his flat, Chandler slumped against the door and closed his eyes. He locked and unlocked it, over and over again, listening intently to the mechanical slide and click and counting until his mind was emptied of the visions of Barlow dying. Slowly he turned around to face the man himself. Bleary-eyed and exhausted, he fell against him. With his face pressed into his neck, he inhaled his warm scent. His pulse on his lips matched the beat in his ears of his own blood. Chandler heaved a sigh of relief. He was alive. He was alive.

Barlow guided him into the bedroom and towards the bed. Before he could make contact with it, Chandler grabbed onto his shoulders and frantically clawed at them to haul himself back onto his feet.

“My clothes. They can’t touch the bed.”

“Oh — okay.”

Barlow helped Chandler out of his coat then left him alone to deal with the rest. In the shower, Chandler eased himself down the wall until he was sitting.

“I’ll be off,” Barlow said through the door. “If you need anything, don’t hesitate to call.”

Chandler opened his mouth and eked out a noise that was somewhere between a hiccup and gulp.

“Did you say something?”

“Don’t…”

… _go_.

Silence.

“Please…”

… _stay_.

“Stay.” His voice was hardly a whisper so he took a waterlogged breath and choked out more loudly, “ _Stay._ ”

He heard the rasp of Barlow’s hand sliding down the door.

After he’d dressed himself for sleep, he sat on the edge of the bed, waiting. For something to happen in the hopes that he wouldn’t have to decide on what to do himself, because he didn’t know what to do. When Barlow entered the room, all he could do was watch him. He watched him take one of his hands and open it to press a glass of water into it. He was directed to drink so he drank then handed the glass back. Barlow gave him his phone, which Chandler dutifully arranged on the bedside table alongside with his watch. He was told to get some rest so when the door shut and shut away the world beyond it, he went to sleep.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Chandler awoke in a different darkness. A thin strip of light flickered along the bottom of the door. Panic set in when he heard voices, but it subsided just as quickly when he realized that they were coming from the television. That Barlow was still here. He pulled on a clean jumper and trousers. He padded out to find him watching the news. And knitting. Quite capably. Barlow promptly switched the television off when Chandler made his presence known.

“How are you feeling?”

“Like the inside of my skull was scraped clean with a rusty spoon.”

“Better then. Can you eat?”

Chandler sat down on the sofa beside him and shook his head. “Yes. I don’t know. Later. Maybe.”

“There’s Indian in the fridge if you do get hungry.”

“Thank you. I’ll have some tea instead or…I don’t know.” Chandler sighed irritably. It would have been nice to know something.

Seated in close proximity to Barlow, he could feel the warmth off of his body, and the recent memory of his contact with it suddenly became the clearest in his head. And — _oh god_ — the unmistakable mound of his genitals squashed against his thigh. Of all the things that did occur during the impressionist blur of those hours, why did he have to recall that so distinctly? He pasted a hand to his face as if he could hide from it.

His embarrassment didn’t much temper the urge to sit closer to him though and rest his head on his shoulder then pull his arm around him and then the other arm. He also recalled being held by him and comforted in a way he couldn’t recall being before. As scared as he was, he also knew he was safe but couldn’t comprehend how one could be both simultaneously.

“It’s weird seeing you out of a three-piece suit and tie.”

Chandler sheepishly looked down at himself. He did feel rather exposed dressed like this.

“Joe, I’m so sorry. I didn’t think being there would trigger a reaction like that.”

Chandler furrowed his brow. “I’ve been there countless times. There’s no reason why this time I’d remember — no, not remember. How can I remember things that didn’t happen to me?”

“What things?”

He sagged against the sofa. “Of being burnt. With a candle, I think. And cut and…a lot of water. There was freezing cold water everywhere.” He pushed his sleeve up. The only marks on his arm were self-inflicted scratches. “Maybe I’ve gone mad. Maybe it was bound to happen. It — something — must run in the family.”

“You’re not mad.”

“All right, Dr. Barlow, I’m not mad,” he said with a tired chuckle, but Barlow clearly saw no humor in this.

“Those things did happen to you. But in another time when you were a man named Thomas.”

“When I — ? What? Ah. Yes. I think I understand now. You’re completely crackers too.”

“They took you from your house in Mayfair to Bethlem Royal Hospital. You were working on legislation that threatened the existing balance of power, and imprisoning you was a desperate and ruthless act of political expediency. At the asylum, they blistered and bled you, and purged you until you vomited blood. They submerged you in ice-cold baths. They chained you when you spoke up and beat you when you resisted — ”

Barlow’s voice began to quaver. He stopped to gather himself.

“Back in the park, you were remembering.”

“I wasn’t,” Chandler protested. “I wasn’t remembering anything. It’s the lack of sleep. And stress. That’s all. They amplify my anxieties if I allow them to. I just can’t allow them to.” He twisted the lid off the pot of Tiger Balm he kept on the coffee table. The metallic scrape of each turn sawed through his nerves. He managed to daub some onto his temples before dropping the lid onto the floor.

“I had hoped you’d realize on your own when the dreams started. When Miranda told me you didn’t recognize her, we knew you hadn’t woken up. So to speak. We hoped that you would if you saw me.”

“Miranda,” Chandler repeated to himself and found the name at home in his mouth.

“When I saw you at the station, it took everything I had to keep from falling to my knees and weeping at your feet. All the time we lost, all those people, we don’t have to lose them again.”

“My wife.” Chandler clapped a hand over his mouth. His wife? An image came into focus. Of a woman with brown eyes and similarly colored hair twisted into an elaborate chignon. Her swan-like neck. The cupid’s bow of her mouth. _My wife_. “And you. You’re…”

Barlow’s lips parted like he’d finish his sentence.

“You’re my…”

 _My truest_ —

Chandler shook his head as if the motion could put his thoughts in their proper order or better yet fling them out completely. When neither happened, he began to frantically tug on his little finger like he could unscrew it from his hand.

Barlow laid his on his arm, and, like that, Chandler stopped.

“When you’re wearing it, you twist your signet ring around your finger when you’re anxious. You have this adorable habit of looking down when you smile. You hate it when your hair gets long enough to cover the tops of your ears. You separate your food on your plate and eat what you like the least first. You refuse to hunch to make yourself shorter for others. Your feet — ”

James swallowed, cutting this evidentiary catalogue of Chandler’s quirks short.

Chandler studied his bare feet. His face pinched in confusion. “What about them?”

“The soles itch when you come.”

A strangled second passed before words could emerge from Chandler’s gaping mouth. 

“ _Well_ — you could have easily gleaned as much from our previous interactions.” He huffed, annoyed to be seen in the way he tended to observe others. “Except the last one,” he added quickly. That particular detail he was not going to confirm. As far as he knew, which wasn’t much when it came to the subject of coming, everyone’s feet did.

“Something compelled you to ask me to stay.”

Chandler leaned forward and rested his head on his hands. He told himself all he had to do was hold on just a little harder. Because if he broke apart, even if he could fully reassemble himself, the cracks would remain. But should he break, he supposed an extra set of arms didn’t hurt to have around to help hold himself together with.

“As you saw, I wasn’t in any condition to be alone.”

“I’m glad you did. You shouldn’t go everything alone, you know.”

“You’re starting to sound like my sergeant.”

“He must have his reasons to say things like that.”

“He refuses to accept that in our line of work, there’s value to — to being alone.”

“If he were here — “

“Well, he isn’t, and I don’t need any lectures from you too. I wouldn’t think he’d approve of whatever this is either.”

“‘This.’”

“Yes, _this_. You and me. I guess I’ve been feeling unusually lonely lately and wanted company.”

“You’re allowed to.”

“I know,” Chandler breathed out. “I know.” He hated giving that feeling a name. _Loneliness_. It was like receiving a diagnosis of a terminal disease or worse — admitting failure. “I do like you. Whatever that means, but I do. And if you’re fond of me, because you think I’m someone else, then…this is wrong.”

“Is there a part of you that wants to believe me though?”

Chandler lifted his face from his hands. His fingertip still glistened with the unguent. In the hollow of chest, he had always longed for something. At some point, he stopped noticing it, hadn’t ever stopped to learn what it was that he might have longed for exactly, although he had his guesses, and the absence of whatever that was had simply become a part of him. He thought maybe he was born without it and could live without it just fine, never having had the reason to consider that, whatever it was, he had given it away to someone a long time ago.

“I…” He wiped his finger off on a tissue, shaking his head again. “I don’t think I know — I don’t think I remember how to want.”

“Thomas showed me that it was all right to want and to not be afraid of that.”

“How though?”

“By encouraging me to be honest with him and with myself, and to not be limited by the opinions of others. By giving me his trust. ” Barlow paused and looked down. He bit his bottom lip before continuing. “And maybe also by kissing me.”

“ _Oh_.”

Chandler froze as if by not moving James wouldn’t be able to see him. He waited for a selection of options for what to do next to arise. They didn’t. Only the words “kiss” and “me” repeated unhelpfully in his head.

He considered that this was some excessively elaborate ploy to get into his trousers. After a month of no attempts to, he doubted it though. He couldn’t ignore his hesitation to even say those words. He couldn’t ignore either the niggling part of himself that had been wondering what the nature of their relationship was and could be. He’d already made a number of exceptions to his own nature to be with him. However possibly mad Barlow might be, Chandler didn’t know if he could stop himself cold now.

His shoulders relaxed.

“Perhaps I ought to do the same. We can think of it as a…forensic reconstruction.”

“A fore— ?” An incredulous laugh dislodged a tear from Barlow’s eye.

“If we are to go along with your story, it might — I don’t know — awaken something.”

“You’re not Sleeping Beauty, Joe.”

“And you’re no handsome prince.”

That earned Chandler a smirk and an arched eyebrow.

“You’re sure?”

Chandler met his eyes squarely, confidently.

“Yes.”

After a second, Barlow burst out laughing. That “yes” certainly surprised Chandler too. Even more, he was amazed that he did say “yes,” because he knew it only took a single “yes” like a single step to enter some place entirely new, where, in this case, the one familiar thing would be this man.

“Stand up then.”

Chandler wiped his palms on his trousers and stood.

“Take a step towards me and place your hands on my shoulders.”

They stood facing each other at about arm’s length, which Chandler found weird, but what did he know about old-timey displays of affection between men.

“I’ve just ordered your father, a cold-blooded opportunist, out of the house for insulting you.”

“My father wasn’t like that.” But he was cold.

“This father was. You’ve known — do know men like this. And this man exhibits nothing but disgust and at best disappointment at you. But because he’s powerful and famously vindictive, no one has ever dared to defend you against him — and you’re stunned that anyone ever would, never mind a person of no standing like me. I now fully realize how far I’ve stepped outside of the boundaries of acceptable behavior, and I see my future coming to an end on my dinner plate. And despite the man you’ve shown me you are, I expect repudiation from you. When it doesn’t come, when concern for me comes instead, I think I might shatter. So I declare my love for you for fear that I’d die before I could.” Barlow’s eyes became full of naked adoration, causing Chandler’s breath to hitch. “You rise from your chair and approach me with caution, something you didn’t approach a lot with, and your intentions become clearer to me. But I have to doubt my own reading of your gestures and your wide open face. I assume this can’t mean what I think it means, that which I had wanted for months, because I never got what I wanted without a fight. And I didn’t have to fight for this. Because this is gentle. This is soft, patient, and kind. Qualities my life never possessed until you.”

Chandler snatched a hand away from James’s shoulder to wipe his eye. He was approximately five times more confused, but his confusion didn’t matter much at the moment, because what James had gotten from his Thomas, he was certain he wanted that too.

James shifted closer — cautiously — giving Chandler ample time to turn him away, except the ground had suddenly dipped and tipped Chandler inexorably towards him. He jerked back reflexively and tried to readjust himself on this new footing but was already falling by then. When he opened his eyes, he was relieved to find himself still in one piece. Not broken apart but maybe just a little open.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> an example of creating the content you want to see, but ohhhhh this is so out of my wheelhouse, and my stomach is a boiling cauldron of acid as i post this.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> penises!

“James…Darby?” Chandler removed the heels of his hands from his eyes. “But why? What did you do?”

“In this life?”

Chandler spluttered an incredulous “ _YES_.”

“Nothing.”

Chandler inhaled deeply and kneaded his temples. At this rate, he was going to grind his own skull down into a fine powder.

“Yet.”

“‘Yet’?”

James shrugged. “I suspect that Ash might be trying to preemptively keep us apart.”

“So you think he knows about us — I mean, you and Thomas? I mean — I don’t know what I bloody mean.”

“I don’t know what he knows, but he must remember something to be concerned about me.”

“Then what about his daughter? Did he send her away?”

“That was his original intention, but Abigail had become aware before any of us and had reached out to Miranda. My guess is that she’s with her.”

“Goddamn it, James.” Chandler stood up and scrubbed his face with a hand. A clock started up somewhere. It ticked loudly between his ears. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know. Honest. That email with that old news clip of you was the last communication I received from her. But if Miranda is who she was, Abigail is safe. And if Abigail is who she was too, she left her father willingly.”

“That means nothing!” Chandler snapped.

“How much have you actually been told about her disappearance, Joe? Is Ash and his people, your Commander any more trustworthy on this than me?”

Chandler shook his head resignedly.

_No_. Not about this anyway. They had told him nothing. _Nothing_. Rett must have been covering for Ash’s involvement with Haverhill House, but he had no proof of it. And if Ash was lying about Abigail in a cheap bid to gain sympathy from voters, it was to his advantage that she stayed away. He quietly seethed. The depths people like him were willing to plumb for personal gain while not shocking still infuriated him.

He dropped onto the sofa next to James. Heavy already with the weight of this life, he didn’t exactly need the burden of another one.

Granted, some things made more sense if he chose to believe James, but that was going to require faith, and he was not a man of faith. Having encountered madness enough times, he knew how conveniently malleable delusions could be. How they could fill gaps of any size and shape that were often present in truths. He wondered if his mother had fallen for one that might have satisfied her desperate need to know why, then maybe, just maybe… But that was not another thread he needed to pull on.

His ability to remain rational was in near tatters, and mending each tear was becoming a Sisyphean task. Chandler conceded that right now it would be better to let the wind blow through him rather than batter him if he cherished his sanity.

He rested his head on the back of the sofa and closed his eyes. He probably could have slept for days if his mind would have allowed him to.

He put out a limp hand between them for James to take. He wasn’t sure if there was greater meaning behind the gesture other than he wanted to and found comfort in the rare simplicity of that want. When James placed his hand in his did he find the strength to carry on a little further.

The following days he spent listening to the rest of Flint’s story — and their story. From the dizzying heights of their romance to the consuming despair that followed. The recovery of Flint’s belief in the possibility of a better world, just to have it snatched away, forced to make a choice he shouldn’t have had to. If the world was to continue denying him the peace he fought for, what peace there was for a man like him could have only come with Thomas. In the end they did have each other, but it was neither a happy or a sad ending as they never should have been apart in the first place. Separated again by time, James was intent on being with Thomas again. But without all of the loss, without all of the pain.

With time having fallen out of order, Chandler was growing less sick at the sight of the sun rising. He slept when his body succumbed helplessly to exhaustion. He ate when his body panged from hunger. His daily alarms canceled, he took up the day when his body said to. He dreamed with his eyes open.

Sitting by the windows, he watched life, indifferent to this all, teeming on the streets below as someone who was always slightly outside of it. Each time the veil lifted between this life and that one, carried upwards by the breeze of a speculative memory, soft and welcome, of the two of them, neither became more real. Both instead seemed to become less so. The tightrope beneath his feet, upon which he had long balanced his life, was no longer there.

“Why haven’t I had more good dreams?” Chandler asked. He massaged his shoulder which throbbed with a phantom ache.

“It’s possible you have and simply don’t remember.”

Chandler debated if a dream that required a change of bedding could be classified as a good one, but it was definitely memorable. Otherwise what good he could recall was so gauzy and fleeting as to be negligible. Stripes of sunlight on white sheets. Flowering gardens and fat bees, birdsong and such. The constant presence of someone beside him, the vaguest awareness of which sometimes lingered long past waking.

“If you think that much of what’s good in life is soft and supple, the memories of them most likely and easily slip through your fingers. And if you try digging for them like you’re doing now, you know you’ll probably end up pricking yourself on a bad one. And the bad ones will always stand out because of that. They’re the ones that leave a mark after all. The good ones, even before I understood what they were telling me, are what carried me through the anger and loneliness. They might not have marked me, but I’d already been transformed by the good I had known, the good that Thomas and Miranda had shown me.”

The more he talked like this, the more acutely Chandler felt the difference between him and Thomas. Whatever manner of man he was to inspire such deep and abiding emotion, Chandler was positive he was not that.

“Let’s be honest. He sounds nothing like me. He was driven by passion and acted on it in ways I never have and may never. You can’t deny that I pale in comparison.”

“Haven’t you though? Aren’t you dedicated to the true mission of your job? To your principles? To your team? Haven’t you put yourself in harm’s way for them? Don’t you struggle to work within a system that resists change? Don’t you resent the hierarchy that serves to sustain itself rather than the people?”

“You’re flattering me. Of course, it’s not as flattering as having a war waged against England in my memory, but still. I’m flattered.”

“Thomas was my world, and when I lost him I wanted to change the world I was left with so that it could be more like him.” James smiled wistfully. “And, yes, you are different. Very different, but so am I. And so’s this world. And yet I’m completely taken by you all the same. To me that confirms that it can never be any other way with him. With you. With every iteration there might be and might have been, however many variations in detail, I will never not love him.”

Chandler lowered his eyes. He couldn’t bear to be looked at like that — he shouldn’t be looked at like that. It made him feel fraudulent through no fault of his own. And yet he wrestled with the need to reconcile that he wasn’t his Thomas with the temptation to accept what this man offered: a bulletproof love. One that time, god, and the devil couldn’t destroy. One that surely could withstand his particularity but wasn’t meant for him.

“This must hurt. Seeing him right here in front of you like this.”

“You’ve made up your mind then?”

“I — “ Chandler chuckled exasperatedly. “You understand why I can’t believe you, don’t you?”

James nodded, but his disappointment was visible.

“Joe. You don’t need to be him for me to fall in love with you.”

Chandler turned his head away only to be faced with his own tired reflection in a window. He already knew this on a conceptual level, but it was unnerving to hear out loud and applied to him. It wasn’t anything close to conclusive, but it was a concession, an opening for something Chandler could conceivably handle. To his surprise, he felt hopeful but also reckless to feel so.

They decided to venture out for dinner for a much needed break and go on what Chandler would have denied was a date. But as the timeless adage went: fake it ’til you make it. So they jokingly asked each other how their day went. Then Chandler about James’s research, and James about Chandler’s work. The conversation, which had begun haltingly, flowed more freely as the night progressed. The laughter more readily and more loudly. They talked about death cults and knitting pirates over a shared plate of leeks vinaigrette. A hand intermittently crossed the table to caress the back of the other’s or tap it for emphasis while expounding a point.

After settling up, Chandler went to wash his hands. Standing at the sink, an emptiness suddenly yawned open inside of his chest. He realized during this brief moment away from James that he missed him. A ridiculous overreaction that befit a lovesick adolescent and not him, and the flush of embarrassment crept up his neck. As he shook his hands dry, he considered that maybe this meant they could actually, possibly make it.

They weren’t quite ready to return to their respective homes and headed to a nearby bar. The sickly smell of alcohol permeated Chandler’s senses, and he could almost taste it when they entered. For the sake of his unsteady mental state, he abstained, ordering a cranberry and soda for himself and a whisky neat for James. The place was more packed than Chandler would have preferred, and the undulations of the crowd herded them into a tight corner. He struggled to stay out of coughing distance of neighboring patrons and practically plastered himself to James’s side.

Their knees repeatedly knocked every time one of them shifted. They both started to sweat as the room grew warmer. Hoarse from yelling, they resorted to speaking directly into each other’s ears. When James swept his bar mat off the ledge with his elbow, they both reached out to catch it in mid-air. Their faces came too close together to avoid contact, and it began with a brush of Chandler’s lips against James’s cheek, an accident that couldn’t have led to anything else but kissing. So they kissed like it was the most natural thing to do. And they kept kissing and lost themselves in the easy pleasure of each other’s touch.

James pressed his mouth to his ear and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

He led Chandler out to the relative quiet of the pavement. Without the cover of the crowd, Chandler started to become too aware of himself again, and his anxiety ballooned. He wondered if he asked James to stay the night, and he did, would they…? And what if he couldn’t? And what if they did? And what if he wasn’t any good? Would James…? Why was he wondering about this in the first place?

He was fumbling with the small jar in his pocket when James cupped his face. The entirety of his being melted in those hands, and the jar slipped from his loose fingers, forgotten. James stood on his toes to kiss Chandler on the forehead and, faster than the acrid smell of Tiger Balm or the stinging snap of an elastic band, scattered the proliferating questions.

They returned to his flat, where more questions hung unanswered in the air. If James couldn’t let go of Thomas, would Chandler ultimately have to let go of James? If they were fated to be together, weren’t they also to be torn apart? And if James had information about Abigail, wasn’t he neglecting his duties by not bringing him in? Chandler brought his fingertips to his forehead and invoked James’s kiss upon it like a spell.

It was his job to view the world with a precision he tended not to apply to his own interior self. So he set aside the questions that seemed to purposely highlight what was missing from his life despite all that he had and what was wrong with him despite the good that he did. The answer to one he hadn’t they danced around and hinted at in the little touches and smiles they shared as Chandler made them tea.

Their conversation gradually faded into a pregnant silence. Chandler set his mug down on a coaster then pushed it towards the center of the coffee table, then nudged the mug towards the center of the coaster.

If there was any Thomas in him, he must have emboldened Chandler to ask, “If he were here right now, what would you do? With him?”

James choked on his tea and coughed into the crook of his elbow. After a bout of throat-clearing, he said, “I’m not sure I should answer that out loud.”

Mortified, Chandler’s gaze shot up to the ceiling, but its pristine blankness failed to replace the images of his ravishment James’s response planted in his head.

“Why don’t I retract the question? And we can sit here quietly like Trappist monks.”

“How about what I would do with you? If that might be…less challenging.”

Chandler tugged his collar away from the growing knot in his throat. His cheeks prickled with heat.

It would be but not by much.

“I can stay right here and only talk. Nothing else. You can tell me to stop. Or join in. Whatever you want to do.” James gripped the mug with both hands and settled into the lounge chair as a demonstration of his sincerity.

Chandler girded himself with a deep breath. He was despite himself curious. “All right. What would you do?”

“First, I’d kiss you again. Gently.”

Easy enough. Chandler knew that he enjoyed being kissed, and it was a small victory to know that at least.

“Then I’d cradle the back of your head and touch your hair where it’s the shortest and the softest.”

Chandler brought his own hand to the back of his head and ran his fingers through the velvety bristles at his nape. It was usually just a place for pent-up stress and the precise snips of scissors, certainly not the caresses of another man.

“Then maybe I’d kiss the pale mole on your upper lip.”

His hand came around his head to his upper lip. Gooseflesh followed his light fingers across his cheek. When he dabbed the tiny circle of raised skin, his brain pinged.

“You have one as well, don’t you?”

He leaned forward to reach out for James’s face and touch him there too but stopped himself short, thinking better of rummaging around in his mustache.

“And then what?” he asked as he needlessly straightened his shirt.

“Then I’d kiss you properly. Which I guess could mean less gently. Which could mean parting your lips with my tongue to draw out yours. It could mean sucking on your bottom lip as I pull away to see the hungry look on your face.”

“Erm. Yes.” Chandler had closed his eyes to better see and feel his words. “I suppose it could mean that.”

His fingertips drifted over his mouth, unsealing its seam, his tongue just tasting them. He adjusted his face into an expression that he thought could be called hungry with his brow furrowed and his mouth slightly open in a soundless beckoning.

“Then I would steer you closer to me so that our bodies were more flush, and — _god_ , you’re so warm. And strong. And I’d want to be even closer to you. As close as humanly possible.” James’s voice faded on a tremble. After a brief pause, he cleared his throat again and continued. “I’d want to really feel you. Your body and the beating of your heart.”

Chandler pressed a hand to his chest in search of it. Pressed hard against the shallow, barely perceptible throb. Then pressed harder. “So…maybe you’d push me down onto the sofa?”

“Yes. I would.”

Chandler’s other hand slid out tentatively across the seat cushion. The leather creaked under his shifting weight as he lay down.

“And perhaps lie on top of me.”

“Yes. And then I’d unbutton — “

“My collar,” Chandler interrupted.

Everything had gone tight. His clothes, his skin, his mouth around his tongue. The room had become terribly warm, and his body terribly restless. It buzzed while his mind swam in syrup. Was this what desire felt like then? If it was supposed to, Chandler wasn’t sure if he particularly cared for it. He thought he might actually dislike it. He thought he might actually —

He hastily unbuttoned his shirt about halfway down and grazed the length of his clavicle with the sudden need to be touched there.

“And now what?” James asked.

“You’ve unbuttoned my collar so that you could — ”

“Kiss your neck. I’d start behind your ear — ” From the thought of that alone, Chandler made a small noise of anticipation through his nose. “ — and you’d moan a little. And hopefully you’d laugh too. And then I’d — “

“Unbutton the rest of my shirt.”

“Unbutton the rest of your shirt.”

Untucked and unbuttoned, one side of his shirt fell open, baring most of his torso. His hand smoothed over the hard and rounded musculature of his chest and the angled jut of his ribcage, then continued down his abdomen until it settled on his belt buckle.

Chandler’s eyes flew open to that blank mocking ceiling again. He was — utterly — flaccid. His performance proving to be inadequate, the twin specters of failure and disappointment reared their heads. He lay there in silence while he considered the flaws in this approach. None of which implicated James, since there was no mistaking his desire. And yet he sat there patiently as he promised he would and would remain sitting there if Chandler asked him to.

He moved his hand away from his crotch. Because it wasn’t about that necessarily, was it? It was about him. Chandler desired him.

He sat up, scratching his head. “Please sit next to me.”

His words roused James from his fantasizing with a start. He carefully set the mug down and sat next to him, far enough on the other end of the sofa that Chandler had to move toward him. He placed a hand high on James’s thigh and squeezed as if he was a hypothesis he needed to test first. James, restraining himself, didn’t react except to swallow and blink. His eyes were clearly questioning though, and they asked after Chandler’s certainty and for his permission, which Chandler gave with a smile, and with his consent, James was promptly kissing him as he should have been already. His fingers carded through Chandler’s hair, and a sob of relief — _joy_ — burst from him.

Chandler was on his back again, pinned beneath James for real this time. He was as solid and as strong as he appeared, and despite being bigger than him, Chandler felt strangely small although not unpleasantly so. He exhaled long and contentedly at being able to cede any more vain attempts at control. James’s body, the heat and heft of it, had a comforting familiarity, and there was safety in this familiarity to let go. So he did, and, with their legs slotted together and their arms locked around each other, his hips began to move involuntarily against James, asking for more. Pleading, _More_.

James propped himself up and looked at Chandler in wonder. His hand, starting at Chandler’s jaw, the brush of a thumb across his lips, slid unhurriedly down his cheek and down his chin and then down his chest. His mouth, not far behind, kissed its own way until it reached his nipple. He drew it in between his lips and circled it with the tapered tip of his tongue. The sensation, startling and new to Chandler, punched a cry out from him. He wasn’t sure what to make of it or do with it other than to mindlessly whisper —

“Don’t. Stop.”

James lightly tugged on the nub with his teeth, and Chandler bucked into the arch of James’s legs. His cock was unmistakably hard now. It grazed a seam on James’s jeans, and a surge of pleasure rushed up his body. He shifted himself against him, trying different angles and degrees of pressure, to find the same point of contact but failed to and deflated with a grunt.

James rested his palm on the front of Chandler’s trousers. His touch stunned him into stillness but the rise and fall of his chest. James lightly squeezed and stroked him through the worsted wool. Chandler’s thoughts immediately chased after his touch, leaving thankfully very little behind in his other head.

James undid his trousers with deliberate slowness, almost out of disbelief than to titillate as if at any second one of them would wake up and end this dream. His fingers though warm were cool on Chandler when he finally freed his erection from the confines of his clothes. Chandler inhaled sharply at the sight of it and everything that could potentially follow now. There was no other part of him that more disconcertingly suited the word flesh and all of its connotations. The last time he found himself under similar circumstances was at university, when he still cared about caring about sex, and he could hardly look at it then. But the way James looked at him, he couldn’t help seeing it differently. The rosy color, the shine on the head, the drop of precum that glistened in the slit — the sight of it under the lights of James’s adoring gaze left him feeling raw. It might as well have been his heart in James’s hand.

“Touch me like that again.”

“I will. And I’m going to watch you watch me as I do.”

Chandler managed a stiff nod. He trained his eyes on James’s fist as it rode loosely up and down the shaft. Since Chandler didn’t have a reason to own lube, James kept his touch light and focused on working his foreskin over the head. It didn’t look like he was doing much, and the friction was minimal, but the swirl of his thumb around the tip, the expert rubbing of a particular spot reduced him to a trembling cluster of nerves. Heat spread thickly outwards from where they joined and throughout him and over his skin in uneven waves. He writhed but then started to squirm. His clothes were turning into damp restraints.

“James, my clothes. A towel. I think I need a — ”

James immediately released him and gave Chandler space to remove his clothes.

When James returned from the bathroom with a towel, Chandler stood to meet him, offering a full, unimpeded view of his body. He stepped forward, wanting the same from James and to behold him as he did him. He gathered the hem of James’s shirt and raised it over his head. He was well acquainted already with the dense spread of freckles on his face and had assumed they’d be as abundant on the rest of his body, but no assumption or memory masquerading as a dream could have prepared him for the reality of them. In awe, he ran a hand flat across James’s chest and through the bright copper-colored hair that covered it. He ducked his head to lick the line of his collarbone as if his freckles would have a particular flavor and texture.

His hands drifted down James’s sides and skated along the waist of his jeans before joining at his fly. James, sensing his nervousness, pushed Chandler back down onto the sofa and pushed his jeans down himself. His cock was nearly at eye level, and it was remarkably _un_ freckled. Chandler gulped. Loudly, almost comically so. Surely James heard that and the unsticking of his tongue from the roof of his mouth. Blood pounded in his ears to the rhythm of his panic. No. His excitement. Not that he could really tell the difference between them in this state. He’d never had a penis in his mouth before, had never aspired to, and yet here he was, dizzy with the impulse to put this one in his. Like it belonged there — to him — and had been missing from it for far too long.

He looked up at James and licked his lips. “What would you do now?” he asked since the possibilities seemed countless.

“This.”

James got down on his knees before him. He worshipfully covered the tops of Chandler’s feet with his hands. They climbed the bony ridges of his shins and over his knees and up his thighs, parting them further.

“And take you in my mouth.”

“ _Oh_.”

“Is that all right?”

“Yes.” Chandler’s voice was all air.

He screwed his eyes shut when James’s breath wafted over him then sighed as softly as James kissed the head of his cock. It wasn’t going to take much, and embarrassment prematurely snuck in during this moment of self-awareness. As James’s tongue ran the length of his cock from base to tip, his body as well as those pesky thoughts seized up. A longer lick journeyed over the seam of his sac and upwards again then paused in a sucking kiss to his frenulum, and they tightened up even more. His tongue continued higher to circle the head, and the pleasure rapidly building inside of him blotted out all else in his mind.

He willed his eyes open to watch himself disappear into James’s mouth. The intimacy of this act, however common it might have been to many, was difficult for Chandler to fathom as was the depth of pleasure it produced. He moaned into his hand when the wet heat of James’s mouth engulfed him, at the changing pressure and shape of his tongue against him. James cupped his balls and lovingly traced their shapes with his thumb. All of this would have handily driven Chandler right over the edge if James hadn’t slowed and wrenched him precipitously down. Chandler swallowed a cry of frustration and slumped against the sofa, panting, only now conscious of the fact that he’d been holding his breath. Just as he started to relax into this lull, James resumed carrying out his apparent objective of working Chandler into a frenzy.

“ _James_.”

_James_.

“ _Oh_ …”

The pace of James’s movements quickened. The suction around him intensified. James’s free hand roved up his torso and, like an exclamation point, a pinch to his nipple was his final prompt to come. Chandler arched away from the sofa and gripped the hand on his chest and held on, squeezing it as tightly as he was wound. There wasn’t enough sense in him to say or motion to James to pull off, and he could only cry out when his hips thrusted towards his release. With his hand still white-knuckled around his, he spilled into James’s mouth.

“Oh — “ _Oh god_.

Collapsed into himself, his knees spasmed. The soles of feet began to itch. He opened his eyes to see James pressing kisses to his wet cock and languorously licking what seeped out, and came again.

“Thank you,” Chandler murmured as James wiped him off with the towel. He figured that was the appropriate thing to say, but nothing could have sounded more awkward.

James tilted his head up, and they met in a kiss. Part of Chandler feared tasting himself on James’s lips albeit without any notion of how he tasted. With his mouth firmly attached to his, James rose to sit back next to him. Chandler pulled him into an embrace, craving that incomparable closeness of skin on skin.

He reached down between them and gave James’s cock a hesitant stroke. He found himself wanting to taste him too so he lowered his head, signaling his intention to do so. James’s hand came up the back of his neck and over his hair to comfort and encourage him. He knew he wouldn’t be able to take James as he had him, but knowing wasn’t doing and while doing Chandler had surprised himself plenty tonight.

As he had somewhat expected, James tasted simply of skin, but slick with saliva, the mouthfeel of him, the almost luxurious smoothness of the head was what he hadn’t expected. If he was able to get hard again that soon, he could have from this and the choked-off sighs James emitted. His pleasure quickly became Chandler’s, and with each jerk of his hips and utterance of Chandler’s name in lieu of God’s, it increased. The now overwhelming need to rip noises of ecstasy from him made up for his lack of experience, and he took James with abandon, deeply and more messily than he could ever imagined himself capable.

Chandler lifted his head with an unhappy huff. His neck had started to ache. Apparently charmed by this, James smiled. He swiped Chandler’s wet bottom lip with his thumb then, leaning into him, kissed him and maneuvered him back against the armrest. Straddling his chest, he guided his cock into Chandler’s mouth. The angle wasn’t advantageous for him to take more than the head so he stroked, and he licked. He cupped James’s buttock and appreciatively squeezed the perfect swell of it. He nudged him forward, urging him to move, and James began to rock into Chandler’s fist and the ring of his ruddy lips.

James suddenly let go of the arm rest at either side of Chandler’s head and slipped out of his hold. Chandler flinched, taken aback. When he grasped the situation, he observed with exhilaration and something like fascination James’s orgasm as it came in pulses onto his chest. Afterwards, James stilled completely, for enough time that Chandler twinged with concern. With a muffled grunt, James wilted over him until his forehead came to rest on his.

“James?”

His chest shuddered with silent laughter. He smiled so Chandler did too. Their mouths joined clumsily in slack but sweet kisses.

In a daze, Chandler watched his cum’s lazy course down his sternum until James wiped it up with the towel. He rubbed what residue there was and wrinkled his nose at its subtly chlorinated scent while James started the shower for him.

He returned to Chandler and swept aside the sweat-tipped hair from his forehead.

“Are you okay?”

A short laugh burst from Chandler. “Sorry. Yes, I am. I may need help getting to my feet though.”

Since his knees hadn’t quite reconstituted themselves, he listed, stumbled into James who braced his waist with an arm. The way James looked at him now — Chandler truly wished he could believe instead of wishing he could tell him to stop (but could he do that either?). If he wasn’t so intoxicated, his brain that addled, he might have gotten upset at how those eyes seemed to say those words when he looked at him like that. Those words that echoed in his own heart and wanted to be spoken by his own mouth, whether he’d even mean them or not, and in this moment, that felt close to happening. If this was any indication that he was succumbing to this collective delusion, why wasn’t he afraid? 

_Say them then if you aren’t, if you want to, if you’re already regretting it before you have_.

_If I were Thomas_. Chandler peeled himself away. _But I’m not_. He staggered towards the bathroom. He left the door open as an invitation. From the corner of his eye, he saw James enter. His heart leapt. Just a little.

Wanting and not — what an unfair position to be in.

“Can I join you?”

Chandler nodded at him through the glass partition. He came up behind him and wound his arms around Chandler’s waist, pasting himself to his back and nosing his nape.

“You might as well make yourself useful.”

James’s chest rumbled pleasantly with laughter. Chandler passed him a bar of bergamot-scented soap and a body brush. Per his exacting instructions, James liberally soaped him up then thoroughly scrubbed him down, from behind his ears to between his toes until he was pink all over. He set about this task with humor at first, identifying with uncanny accuracy where Chandler was most ticklish, but as he went on, an earnest sense of duty, a vestige of his Navy life, took over.

Where Chandler needed a more tender touch, his now familiar hands slid around and between his legs and into every sensitive crevice with care. His eyes fluttered shut when James’s fingers raked his scalp to work the shampoo in. Not in the particular way Chandler did this but in a way that quelled the reflex to correct him, and his mind went quiet. He rested against James as his weight seemed to dissolve along with the lather. The steady patter of the shower was the lone sound in this temporary world of theirs — warm and clean, it was a world at peace — until James softly announced that he’d finished. Chandler reciprocated with his customary meticulousness. He’d reduced this procedure to its barest efficiency, but, conferred on another, efficiency was replaced by intimacy that soon heated up with renewed desire.

Because of James, his pre-bedtime routine required amending, more time, and — _flexibility_ , he reminded himself to heed. James resumed knitting while Chandler darted busily about the flat. The towel went in the wash and his clothes in the appropriate receptacles. He wiped down the sofa with disinfectant, washed two mugs instead of the usual one, and after much deliberation established a place for a second toothbrush. He checked the locks on the front door and the windows, inspected the oven and the stove, then switched off all the lights in the order he had switched them on.

He studied James, who stood next to the bed, and contemplated his place in this final leg. Remembering then how everything had already been profoundly exploded, he turned down the bedding for him.

“All right?” James asked as he settled in.

Chandler was meditating on the strange new tilt to the mattress. “Ask me tomorrow.”

“It is tomorrow.”

“Ah. Right.”

“Can I kiss you good night?”

Chandler answered by raising himself on an elbow and pitching himself over James who turned his head to face him. His eyelashes caught some stray ambient light and shined like strands of gold. Chandler gasped faintly, surprised by the sheer fact of him. He was real, this man, undeniably and so very real. McGraw, Flint, Darby, Barlow, whoever he was and whoever Chandler was to him, they were here together now.

They kissed.

Eventually Chandler would have to decide. He’d have to review the available information and weigh the pros and cons. He’d have to determine what was right if not best for himself. He knew what happened when he got things wrong, when there was no clear choice to make. When emotions clouded your judgment but also when you denied your own instincts. Disgrace. Endangerment. Death.

“Good night, Joe.”

Another mystery to solve with the truth flickering in and out of view. Sometimes it hovered on the periphery then fled when you turned for a better look. And what did you ultimately gain from looking, from trying to seek clarity? Other than the awareness of how little you could actually know about anyone. About yourself. They all had to co-exist with doubt and lies, misunderstandings and madness, so why was this any less acceptable than those? If this was real or unreal but some shade in between, couldn’t this be its own color too?

“Good night, James.”

Lying beside him felt good, he had to admit. A pure, simple kind of good. A soft buffer between his heart and the weight of his conscience, between his compulsions and the cutting bindings he restrained them with. He was lighter and looser than he’d ever been, and his eyelids lowered effortlessly. Sleep didn’t come in fits and starts or not at all. After the fires were banked and the candles snuffed out, Chandler slept the sleep of centuries.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i used to be able to write short sentences i swear


End file.
